‘I was abducted by Boko Haram aged 5 – our children still face a deadly threat every day’
Aisha was only five years old when Boko Haram militants stormed her village with machetes and butchered her father and brother in front of her.
They had refused to join the rebel group in northern Nigeria’s war-ravaged state of Borno. And so, one of Aisha’s earliest memories, is watching them being murdered as punishment.
But, she says, her ordeal “had only just begun”.
She was then abducted and pushed into child labour until being forcibly married off at the age of 13. She says she spent the next four years being repeatedly raped by multiple militants, falling pregnant and giving birth shortly before managing to escape a few months ago, aged 17.
“I don’t know who the father of my child is,” she says, her voice stumbling to a halt, as her daughter plays, unaware, behind her.
“At one point I felt like killing myself because of what was happening. I felt it would be better to be dead than alive and forced to experience all this.”
Beside her is Hawwa, also 17. She too was abducted aged five by Boko Haram, forced into child marriage, and repeatedly raped over many years. She contracted HIV during her decade-long ordeal and was only rescued a few months ago by Nigerian soldiers who stormed the Boko Haram camp where she was being held.
“In captivity we wished we were dead. The pain from physical beatings was better than the other assaults,” she says, adding that following her release she has had to contend with the double stigma of being a former Boko Haram captive living with HIV.
“People would run away from me in the streets. I was depressed and always sick,” she says, bowing her head.
These stories are harrowing and yet disturbingly common in Nigeria, a country that has been waging a 12 year war with Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden”.
Since the first explosion of violence in 2014, the insurgent group has made children, schools and education a central target. It first dominated international headlines when it abducted more than 300 largely Christian girls from a school in Chibok, also in Borno state. At least 90 are still believed to be in captivity or remain unaccounted for.
Boko Haram has since evolved and multiple armed factions have splintered away from it, including Islamic State affiliates, which Donald Trump announced that the US government bombed for the second time last month.
In this security vacuum, gangs have flourished and also expanded into abducting children, a move officials believe is fuelled by the lucrative illegal adoption market as well as organ harvesting.
ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, says over the last decade alone there have been at least 16 mass abductions of students from schools and hostels carried out by criminal and militant Islamist groups across northern Nigeria. The UN also warned this year that, despite efforts to combat the crisis, Nigeria is witnessing a renewed surge in the abduction of school children.
