AT least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since the start of 2014 and many have been forced into sexual slavery and trained to fight, said Amnesty International in a report released on Tuesday (April 14) to coincide with the first anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok school girls.
Based on nearly 200 witness accounts, including 28 with abducted women and girls who escaped captivity, a new 90-page report, ‘Our job is to shoot, slaughter and kill’: Boko Haram’s reign of terror, documents multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Boko Haram, including the killing of at least 5,500 civilians, as it rampaged across north-east Nigeria during 2014 and early 2015.
Aisha was 19 when she was kidnapped along with her sister. Her identity has been concealed.
“They used to train girls how to shoot guns. I was among the girls trained to shoot. I was also trained how to use bombs and how to attack villages,” she said.
“They told me how to attack towns and villages, how they attack other people, how they slaughter infidels,” she added.
The report sheds new light on the brutal methods used by the armed group in north-east Nigeriawhere men and boys are regularly conscripted or systematically executed and young women and girls are abducted, imprisoned and in some cases raped, forcibly married and made to participate in armed attacks, sometimes on their own towns and villages.
“We have no direct evidence that the Chibok girls are now fighters. But we do know how Boko Haram operates. Abducted women were taken to makeshift transit camps, raped, taught Boko Haram’s interpretation of Islam and prepared for forced marriage to their fighters. Some have even been trained for battle,” said Nigeria researcher Daniel Eyre.
The report contains graphic evidence, including new satellite images, of the scale of devastation that Boko Haram have left in their wake. (Reuters/Amnesty International)
