Escaped Chibok girl reveals others are alive; many impregnated and carrying various diseases

Escaped Chibok girl reveals others are alive; many impregnated and carrying various diseases

Numerous girls have given birth to children against their will

By Michael Ireland, Senior Reporter, ASSIST News Service, answritermike@gmail.com  

NIGERIA (ANS, October 20, 2015) -- Many of the 200 girls of the Government Secondary School, Chibok abducted in April 2014, are alive and holed up in the Lake Chad region of the North-East epicenter of the battle to dislodge Boko Haram terrorists from Nigeria, according to one of the kidnapped girls who recently managed to escape.

Kingsley Omonobi, writing for Saturday Vanguard (www.vanguardngr.com) in an Oct.10 post, reports Boko Haram released a new video claiming to show the missing Nigerian schoolgirls, alleging they had converted to Islam and would not be released until all militant prisoners were freed.

A total of 276 girls were abducted on April 14 from the northeastern town of Chibok, in Borno state, which has a sizeable Christian community. Some 223 are still missing.

A screengrab taken on May 12, 2014, from a video of Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram obtained by AFP shows girls, wearing the full-length hijab and praying in an undisclosed rural location.

Saturday Vanguard reports that sources disclosed that the girls who were relocated from the initial Sambisa Camps of the terrorists, following unrelenting bombardments by air and land operations, have been relocated to Lake Chad area, with some of the girls spread along border communities.

The Nigeria-based publication stated that about two weeks ago, one of the abducted girls, who was formerly kept in a Sambisa forest camp, escaped from the hands of the abductors and ran into the hands of some Fulani herdsmen. It was the Fulani herdsmen, having confirmed that the girl was a Chibok girl, who assisted her to get to the Baga military base of the multi-national Joint Task Force.

The website says that at the Baga base, the escapee girl was said to have confessed that many of them were forcefully married to the terrorists, who not only impregnated them, but infected some of them with different diseases. On her part, she was not only impregnated, but she got the V V F (Vesicant Virginal Fistula) disease from one of the terrorists.

Saturday Vanguard reports that according to the escapee, at the camp where she escaped from there were about 60 of the girls, while others were shared and moved to border communities. Narrating more tales of woe on what the Chibok girls went through and are still going through in the hands of the terrorists, the source said the V V F disease with which she was infected by the terrorist had made her uncomfortable, hence her decision to flee to seek medical help, as she was repeatedly passing solid waste uncontrollably.

The source said, “When the Fulani herdsman saw the girl in the bush and questioned her about her mission, she narrated her experience, which made the herdsman take her to the soldiers in that area. With her escape, there are now 59 of the girls left in her camp.”

Emphasizing that almost all of the girls have been married out to the Boko Haram terrorists, while quite a number of them have delivered babies, the escapee told security agencies that the girls were always moved from place to place in the Sambisa forest during the bombardments, but that when the heat was too much, they were all moved out of the forest.

Saturday Vanguard said the escapee further disclosed to security agencies that Boko Haram terrorists have been seriously weakened and are now moving from place to place “aimlessly like lost sheep”, planting mines and IEDs (improvised explosive devices), to which some security forces have mistakenly fallen prey.

“All of us were forced to become Muslims, but kept in camps far from each other,” she revealed. “You can only see and recognize those in your camp, as any of us who refused being Islamized was either beheaded or shot at point blank range.”

She further revealed that the camps where the Chibok girls are now kept are in Kangoora, Mallam Fatori, Damasak, Tunbun Kaka and Tumbum Gira. Many of these towns are located in the border communities around Lake Chad with some in Nigeria and others in Chad.

Photo captions: 1) A group in Chibok remembering the missing schoolgirls. 2) A mother weeps for her missing daughter. 4) Chibok protestors. 3) Michael Ireland.

About the writer: Michael Ireland is a Senior Correspondent for the ASSIST News Service, as well as a volunteer Internet Journalist and Ordained Minister who has served with ASSIST Ministries and ASSIST News Service since its beginning in 1989. He has reported for ANS from Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, Jordan, China, and Russia. Click http://paper.li/Michael_ASSIST/1410485204  to see a daily digest of Michael's stories for ANS.

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