“They turned me into a sex machine,” said 23-year-old mother of four Asabe Aliyu. In tears, she described to the Nigerian Daily Times the horrific treatment during her six months held captive by Nigeria’s Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram.
“They took turns to sleep with me. Now, I am pregnant and I cannot identify the father,” she said. After the repeated rapes, Aliyu was forced to marry one of the militants.
“Death was the punishment for any infraction or mistake,” said Aliyu, who intermittently vomits blood from internal injuries she sustained from daily beatings after six months of captivity.
Hundreds of women and children were rescued in the last few days from Sambisa forest, according to reports by the Nigerian military — and they all tell horrific tales of forced conversions to Islam, starvation and beatings, and rape and forced marriages.
Boko Haram “told us that if we do not convert to Islam, they will slit our throats,” said 15 year-old Abigail John, a schoolgirl who managed to escape Nigeria’s infamous terrorist group after she was held for four weeks.
“Every day they would come around and tell us we were infidels, that we should convert and accept their religion,” recently rescued 27-year-old Lami Musa told BBC News.
She had been held captive by jihadis for over a year. The jihadis killed her husband when she was four months pregnant. Tired and haggard, she clutched her days-old newborn baby: “Sometimes they beat us; sometimes they’d starve us from food and even water.”
“I know I was dead, my existing now is just a mere shadow of life as nothing moves me,” said former captive Maryamu Adamu. “But now that I am here, I confirm that I am a living being. I thank God that I am alive. I thank God.”
Some of the women and children who escaped Boko Haram are currently at the displaced persons camp in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria, too weak to walk without assistance. Many are gaunt and undernourished.
The Nigerian military released footage it says shows Boko Haram fighters fleeing from Nigerian air force bombardment into the Sambisa forest.
Escapee Maryamu Adamu said she’d “seen hell, and it is called Sambisa.”
