‘Girls volunteer to be suicide bombers for a chance to live’

David McKenzie

them to marry its fighters. “It was just because they want to run away from Boko Haram,” she says, “If they give them a suicide bomb then maybe they would meet soldiers, tell them, ‘I have a bomb on me,’ and they could remove the bomb. They can run away.”

There was no escape for Fati two years ago, when Boko Haram descended on her village in north-east Nigeria. Her future “husband” had a gun, and Fati’s parents had already spent 8,000 naira to smuggle her two older brothers to safety. There was nothing they could do. “We said, ‘No, we are too small, we don’t want to get married,’” Fati recalls. “So they married us by force.”

After he raped her for the first time, Fat i ’s a buser g ave her a wedding present: a purple and brown dress with a matching headscarf that she would wear for the next two years while under his control, whisked from hideout to hideout in order to evade Nigerian authorities. Fati was eventually taken to Boko Haram’s Sambisa forest camp; when her captor suddenly defected, she seized her chance to escape.

Now reunited with her mother, who travelled days to get to the Minaweo camp, Fati says there are still scores of captive girls in the forest — some of them volunteering to die for a chance to perhaps live. Statistics can be numbing. It’s a real story like Fati’s that brings home this tragedy. She could have been my daughter. Or yours.