Freed, but haunted by horrors
Survivors tell of Boko Haram atrocities
BOKO Haram fighters stoned their captives to death as rescuers approached, while other girls and women held by the jihadists were crushed by an armoured car and killed by a landmine as they walked to freedom.
Through tears, smiles and eyes filled with pain, the survivors of months in the hands of the Islamic extremists told their stories on Sunday, their first day out of the war zone.
“We just have to give praise to God that we are alive, those of us who have survived,” 27-year-old Lami Musa said as she cradled her five-day-old baby girl.
She was among 275 traumatised girls, women and young children who were getting medical care and being registered a day after making it to safety.
Nigeria’s military said it had freed nearly 700 Boko Haram captives in the past week. It is still unclear if any of them were among the “Chibok girls” abducted from their school a year ago.
Musa was in the first group of rescued women and girls to be transported by road over three days to the safety of the Malkohi refugee camp on the outskirts of Yola, the capital of northeastern Adamawa state.
“They took me so I could marry one of their commanders,” she said of the militants who carried her away from her village after slaughtering her husband and forcing her to abandon their three young children, whose fates remain unknown. That was five months ago in Lassa village.
“When they realised I was pregnant, they said I was impregnated by an infidel, and ‘we have killed him; once you deliver, within a week we will marry you to our commander’,” she said, tears flowing. Musa gave birth the night before last week’s rescue.
As gunshots rang out, “Boko Haram came and told us they were moving out and we should run away with them. But we said no,” she said from her clinic bed.
“Then they started stoning us. I held my baby to my stomach and doubled over to protect her.”
She and another survivor of the stoning, Salamatu Bulama, 20, said several were killed.
The horrors did not end once the military arrived.
A group of women hiding under bushes could not be seen by soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier, who drove over them. “I think those killed, there were about 10,” Bulama said. Others died from stray bullets.
There were not enough vehicles to transport all of the freed captives and some women had to walk, Musa said. A landmine planted by Boko Haram exploded, killing three.
Bulama’s two-year-old son died two months ago through malnutrition. “What will I tell my husband?” she sobbed after learning her husband was alive.
Binta Ibrahim was 16 when Boko Haram insurgents rode into her village of Izghe in February last year. She, two of her sisters and her sister-in-law were among scores of young women abducted. Her sisters escaped in the pandemonium of an air raid, but Ibrahim, who was caring for three children she found abandoned when the insurgents moved into the next village of Nbitha, did not go with them.
“I had these three kids to care for and I couldn’t abandon them a second time,” she said.
She described trekking for two days from Nbitha to Boko Haram’s hideout in the Sambisa forest with two-year-old Matthew and four-year-old Elija Yohanna on her back and Maryam Samaila, 4, clinging to her waist.
“They were so weak from lack of food they couldn’t walk.”
The children are Christian and Ibrahim is a Muslim in a country polarised along religious lines, but “I love them as if they are my own”, she said. The children remain in her care.