Woman rescued from boko haram narrates how B’Haram prepares girls for suicidal missions

Firstclass newsline learnt that Meriam, who had just arrived at one of
the internally displaced persons' camp in Maiduguri, the Borno State
capital from Gwoza, revealed this to theNew York Times.
She narrated how she was imprisoned with dozens of other women
including some who were being trained as suicide bombers.
According to her, the suicide bomber after being brainwashed, will be
assured of Allah's forgiveness after death.
"The Boko Haram would recite the prayer for the dead," Meriam said.
"Then they would put on thehijab," covering the suicide belt.
After they had prepared, "They said, 'God will forgive us,'" she said.
"Then, they would enter the vehicles, and they would send the women
away."
Meriam said she had seen a few of the Chibok village girls at the
hospital in Gwoza, and said that the Boko Haram appeared to give them
a special status.
TheNew York Timesalso reported that hundreds of women and girls
captured by Boko Haram had been raped, many repeatedly, in what
officials and relief workers described as a deliberate strategy to
dominate rural residents and possibly even create a new generation of
Islamist militants in the country
In interviews, the women described being locked in houses by the
dozen, at the beck and call of fighters who forced them to have sex,
sometimes with the specific goal of impregnating them.
"They married me," said Hamsatu, 25, a young woman in a
black-and-purple head scarf, looking down at the ground. She said she
was four months pregnant, that the father was a Boko Haram member and
that she had been forced to have sex with other militants who took
control of her town.
"They chose the ones they wanted to marry," added Hamsatu, whose full
name was not used to protect her identity. "If anybody shouts, they
said they would shoot them."
Yahauwa, 30, used her green head scarf to wipe away tears as she
clutched a plastic bag full of medicine. She had just tested positive
for H.I.V.
"Is it from the people who forced me to have affairs with them?" she
asked a relief worker, tears streaming down her face.
Later, she explained that she and many other women had been "locked in
one big room."
"When they came, they would select the one they wanted to sleep with,"
she said. "They said, 'If you do not marry us, we will slaughter you.'
 "
As the women spoke, two trucks crammed with more people arrived at the
rudimentary camp guarded by watchful soldiers. Even the local news
media are kept out.
Many of the residents of the camp spend the day outside in blazing
100-degree-plus heat here. They dare not return home.
The humiliation of what the refugees have been through led many of the
women interviewed at the camp to deny being abused by the militants.
But relief workers here said that when they arrived, many acknowledged
that they had been raped.
Yana, a young woman wearing sparkling golden bangles, said the
fighters had "parked" her – a word many women have used to describe
their imprisonment – with about 50 other women in a house in Bama,
Borno State's second city, with a population of several hundred
thousand. Bama was occupied by Boko Haram last September.
Inside the house, "If they want to have an affair with a woman, they
will just take her to a private place, so that the others won't see,"
said Yana in a singsong voice. She could not recall her age; a relief
worker at the camp here said she had been raped so often by Boko Haram
that she was "psychologically affected."
Yana said the militants had forced her to have sex with them.
Her feet and stomach were swollen and the relief worker said she was
likely pregnant, though her test results had not come back yet. Others
workers here said many of the women had signs of physical and
psychological trauma from being raped repeatedly.
Fanna, a delicate 12-year-old who had arrived at the camp here three
days before, crouched on the floor, clasping her knees, and insisted
in her thin child's voice that Boko Haram had not touched her.
"The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the
women," said the Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima. "Some of them,
I was told, even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to
make the products of what they are doing become children that will
inherit their ideology."
"It's like they wanted to have their own siblings, to take over from
them," added Abba Mohammed Bashir Shuwa, a senior state official in
Maiduguri.
A relief official at the camp who is working closely with the abused
women echoed that thought. "We are going to have another set of Boko
Haram," said the official, Hadiza Waziri. "Most of these women now,
they don't want these pregnancies. You cannot love the child."
The militants have openly promised to treat women as chattel. After
Boko Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls from Chibok last
year, the group's leader called them slaves and threatened to "sell
them in the market.
Firstclassnewsline.net