Female extremists hardest to help

Yasidis use int’l stage to put spotlight on trafficking

LONDON, Dec 3, (RTRS): Women who join violent extremists such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram are lured by the promise of power and influence they otherwise would not get in their everyday lives, a top expert said on Thursday.

With that empowerment, women entangled in extremist groups are far more difficult than men to deradicalise and reintegrate into their communities, said Fatima Akilu, executive director of the Neem Foundation, a nonprofit group aimed at countering extremism in Nigeria.

Boko Haram is largely male, but women do volunteer to join what is one of the world’s deadliest Islamist groups, said Akilu, speaking at Trust Women, an annual women’s rights and trafficking conference hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Killed

Boko Haram militants have killed about 15,000 people and displaced 2.6 million others in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger during a seven-year campaign to carve out an Islamist caliphate.

Based in northeastern Nigeria, the jihadist group has kidnapped hundreds of men, women and children including more than 200 girls in 2014 from a school in the town of Chibok.

When Boko Haram swept through northern Nigeria’s towns and villages, its fighters had money and power and often were very appealing to local women, who typically married as children, with some brides as young as 9, Akilu said.

“They were the new cowboys in town, but more than that they afforded these women a lot of choices,” she said.

Women who joined Boko Haram were permitted to learn to assemble weapons, to become combatants, to own slaves and even have a say in which Boko Haram member to marry, she said.

“For the first time in their lives, these women had so many choices, and a lot of them became powerful in the Boko Haram movement,” said Akilu, who founded the Nigerian government’s deradicalisation programme.

Men, on the other hand, tend to enlist in such extremist groups seeking a sense of belonging or identity, not unlike joining a gang, she said.

Under efforts by government or groups such as Neem to extricate people from Boko Haram, men can find positions of power and more choices back home than women do, she said.

Instead, women who leave extremist groups return to lives where they lose the positions of power they had in Boko Haram.

“For them, that sense of power is very, very difficult to relinquish,” Akilu said. “We haven’t really found anything to replace it with.

“These women now come out with such expectations in terms of their changed roles, and society has not changed to meet them.”

Meanwhile, a Yazidi woman imprisoned and raped by Islamic State fighters said she had no idea about the scourge of human trafficking until she found herself enslaved with thousands of other women.

Nadia Murad Basee Taha has become the face of Yazidi women captured in northwestern Iraq in the summer of 2014 and used as sex slaves by the Islamic militants.

Since escaping her captors in November 2014, she has become an advocate for the Yazidis, and for refugee and women’s rights in general, as well as a campaigner against human trafficking.

“Before 2014 we didn’t know there was something called human trafficking,” Murad said on Thursday, speaking at Trust Women, an annual women’s rights and trafficking conference hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Murad, who is also a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, said she was told she was a “slave captive” after Islamic State fighters rounded up Yazidis in the village of Kocho, near Sinjar in northwest Iraq.

The Yazidi are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. Islamic State considers them devil-worshippers.

Murad, now aged 23, was held by Islamic State in Mosul but escaped after several months, reaching a refugee camp and eventually making her way to Germany.

She has since travelled to Egypt, Greece, Kuwait, Norway, the United States and Britain to raise awareness about the plight of the Yazidis, urging the international community to do more to bring the jihadist militants to justice.

“The world needs a lot of work to move forward,” she said. “There are millions of people waiting for freedom.”

Nearly 46 million people globally live as slaves, forced to work, sold for sex, trapped in debt bondage or born into servitude, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index by rights group Walk Free Foundation.

Legacy to village:

A former German soldier has left his life’s savings to a small Scottish village where he was held as a prisoner of war during World War II.

Heinrich Steinmeyer, a Waffen SS soldier, was 19 when he was captured was brought to the POW camp at Cultybraggan near the village of Comrie in Perthshire. After the war, he regularly visited.

He died in 2014, leaving 384,000 pounds ($485,000) to the village in his will. His wish was to help the elderly in the community.

It was unclear why nearly two years elapsed between his death and the announcement of the legacy, but the Comrie Development Trust said that there had been a lengthy process to settle the estate, which was gained from the sale of his house and all his possessions.

“This is his thanks for the kindness shown to him at the point of his life where he was at his lowest ebb and he just wants to say thank you to everybody,” George Carson, whose parents were long-time friends of Steinmeyer, told the BBC.

Carson said his mother and her friends had made friends with Steinmeyer through the fence at the camp.

They discovered that he had never seen a movie. (AP)