In the gloom of a hilltop
cave in Nigeria where she was held captive, Hajja had a knife pressed to her
throat by a man who gave her a choice – convert to Islam or die.
Reuters reports that two
gunmen from Boko Haram had seized the Christian teenager in July in the Gwoza
hills, in the northeastern Nigeria, where a six-month-old government offensive
is struggling to contain an insurgency by the al Qaeda-linked Islamist group.
Boko Haram is abducting
Christian women whom it converts to Islam on pain of death and then forces into
“marriage” with fighters.
The three months Hajja spent
as the slave of a 14-strong guerrilla unit, cooking and cleaning for them
before she escaped, give a rare glimpse into how the Islamists have changed
tack.
“I can’t sleep when I think
of being there,” the 19-year-old told Reuters, recounting forced mountain
marches and watching her captors slit the throats of prisoners Hajja had helped
lure into a trap.
Nigerian security officials
say the Islamists have pulled back after army assaults since May on their bases
and are now sheltering in the Mandara mountains. From the hills they have been
launching increasingly deadly attacks.
Hajja’s account of how Boko
Haram has adapted and survived in recent months underlines the difficulties
governments in the region face.
The military offensive
launched in mid-May, and the fact that large numbers of civilian vigilantes
have supported it, has triggered a fierce backlash against local people by Boko
Haram.
The Islamists dragged Hajja
along rocky mountain paths and slept in caves in the hills, a landscape
unfamiliar to most Nigerian soldiers, recruited from the plains.
She ceremonially converted
to Islam, cooked for the men, carried ammunition during an attack on a police
outpost and was about to be married to one of the insurgents before she managed
to engineer a dramatic escape. She says she was not raped.
“They told me I must become
a Muslim but I refused again and again,” Hajja told Reuters. Her family name is
withheld to protect relatives still living in the Gwoza area.
“They were about to slaughter
me and one of them begged me not to resist and just before I had my throat slit
I relented. They put a veil on me and made me read from the Koran,” she said.
A man called Ibrahim Tada
Nglayike led the group Hajja was with. On one mission, Hajja was sent to stand
in a field near a village to attract the attention of civilians working with
the army. When five men approached her, they were ambushed.
“They took them back to a
cave and tied them up. They cut their throats, one at a time,” Hajja said.
Among those who did the
killing was the Muslim wife of the leader Nglayike, the only other woman in the
band of fighters.
Reuters verified Hajja’s
account of having been abducted with independent figures in the region. Boko
Haram shuns the media and could not be contacted for comment.
Hajja says the long-bearded
insurgents lived a basic lifestyle, eating corn, millet and occasionally meat
from animals.
The group, armed with AK-47
rifles and pistols stolen from police they killed, moved every day around the
hills to avoid being tracked by the army and slept in the caves to shelter from
the cold and for protection against air assaults.
“They didn’t use phones but
they had a radio,” Hajja said.
“They would listen to BBC
Hausa or Voice of America.
“They know the area very
well and many people help them because they are afraid or support their cause,”
Hajja said.
The longer the insurgency
goes on, President Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian, will come under
increasing criticism from his northern opponents as elections in early 2015
draw closer.
Hajja eventually escaped by
feigning severe stomach pains. Thinking her too ill to flee, the insurgents
sent her to hospital escorted only by an older woman. Once she was among other
people, Hajja threatened to denounce the group to police, prompting the woman
to abandon her and flee.
“I finally tore off the veil
and I cried,” Hajja said.
“So many times I thought I’d
die.”
PUNCH
This is what Nigeria has turned into....so sad
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