Earlier in the month, we reported that hundreds of female captives that were rescued by the Nigerian army from Boko Haram a few months were said to be pregnant. Click here if you missed it!
New York Times has now obtained exclusive interviews with many of the women, who spilled the beans one after the other, saying that Boko Haram members actually instituted mass rape on the girls as an instrument of terror and also to further expand their numbers by forced procreation.
The girls were initially embarrassed to admit that they were raped en massed and forced to procreate for the terror group but as one starts summoning their courage to speak up, others followed suit and New York Times was later able to obtain a dossier of anecdotes on what happened while they were held under captivity.
“They married me,” said Hamsatu, 25, “They chose the ones they wanted to marry. If anybody shouts, they said they would shoot them.”
“The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women,” said the Borno 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.”
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau made no secret of his plans for sexual violence after the Chibok girls were kidnapped, making his threats known via a video recording.
“We would marry them out at the age of 9,” says the leader.
New York Times also reported that many of the freed women suffered wide psychological disturbances and the trauma they endured makes many of them unable to leave the tents to seek treatment outside.
It was also reported that some of the women confessed that the Boko Haram members infected them with HIV as they tested positive at the camps.
Another hitherto unknown inimical plan of the terrorist group the interviewers managed to obtain from the rescued victims was that they were harvesting the captured women and children as future suicide bombers.
According to New York Times, Boko Haram is one of the main contributory factor to the defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan during the March presidential election.
