These women include;
Meriam, 36 who said she was imprisoned alongside dozens of women and some of them were picked for suicide mission.
According to her, the suicide bomber after being brainwashed, will be assured of Allah’s forgiveness after death.
“The Boko Haram would recite the prayer for the dead,” Meriam said. “Then they would put on the hijab,” covering the suicide belt.
After they had prepared, “They said, ‘God will forgive us,’” she said. “Then, they would enter the vehicles, and they would send the women away.”
Meriam said she had seen a few of the Chibok village girls at the hospital in Gwoza, and said that the Boko Haram appeared to give them a special status.
The New York Times also reported that hundreds of women and
girls captured by Boko Haram had been raped, many repeatedly, in what
officials and relief workers described as a deliberate strategy to
dominate rural residents and possibly even create a new generation of
Islamist militants in the country
In interviews, the women described being locked in houses by the dozen,
at the beck and call of fighters who forced them to have sex, sometimes
with the specific goal of impregnating them.
“They married me,” said Hamsatu, 25, a young woman in a black-and-purple head scarf, looking down at the ground. She said she was four months pregnant, that the father was a Boko Haram member and that she had been forced to have sex with other militants who took control of her town.
“They chose the ones they wanted to marry,” added Hamsatu, whose full name was not used to protect her identity. “If anybody shouts, they said they would shoot them.”
Yahauwa, 30, used her green head scarf to wipe away tears as she
clutched a plastic bag full of medicine. She had just tested positive
for H.I.V.
“Is it from the people who forced me to have affairs with them?” she asked a relief worker, tears streaming down her face.
Later, she explained that she and many other women had been “locked in one big room.”
“When they came, they would select the one they wanted to sleep with,” she said. “They said, ‘If you do not marry us, we will slaughter you.’ ”
As the women spoke, two trucks crammed with more people arrived at the
rudimentary camp guarded by watchful soldiers. Even the local news media
are kept out.
Many of the residents of the camp spend the day outside in blazing 100-degree-plus heat here. They dare not return home.
The humiliation of what the refugees have been through led many of the
women interviewed at the camp to deny being abused by the militants. But
relief workers here said that when they arrived, many acknowledged that
they had been raped.
Yana, a young woman wearing sparkling golden bangles, said the fighters
had “parked” her – a word many women have used to describe their
imprisonment – with about 50 other women in a house in Bama, Borno
State’s second city, with a population of several hundred thousand. Bama
was occupied by Boko Haram last September.
Inside the house, “If they want to have an affair with a woman, they
will just take her to a private place, so that the others won’t see,”
said Yana in a singsong voice. She could not recall her age; a relief
worker at the camp here said she had been raped so often by Boko Haram
that she was “psychologically affected.”
Yana said the militants had forced her to have sex with them.
Her feet and stomach were swollen and the relief worker said she was
likely pregnant, though her test results had not come back yet. Others
workers here said many of the women had signs of physical and
psychological trauma from being raped repeatedly.
Fanna, a delicate 12-year-old who had arrived at the camp here three
days before, crouched on the floor, clasping her knees, and insisted in
her thin child’s voice that Boko Haram had not touched her.
“The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women,”
said the Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima. “Some of them, I was
told, even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to make
the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit
their ideology.”
“It’s like they wanted to have their own siblings, to take over from
them,” added Abba Mohammed Bashir Shuwa, a senior state official in
Maiduguri.
A relief official at the camp who is working closely with the abused
women echoed that thought. “We are going to have another set of Boko
Haram,” said the official, Hadiza Waziri. “Most of these women now, they
don’t want these pregnancies. You cannot love the child.”
The militants have openly promised to treat women as chattel. After Boko
Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls from Chibok last year,
the group’s leader called them slaves and threatened to “sell them in
the market.”
Culled From Punch
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