NIGERIA/FILE: Interviews with Nigerian woman kidnapped by Boko Haram and held for three months in the remote Gwoza mountains, before escaping

Record ID: 236250

  • Title: NIGERIA/FILE: Interviews with Nigerian woman kidnapped by Boko Haram and held for three months in the remote Gwoza mountains, before escaping
  • Date: 14th November 2013
  • Summary: MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF DESERTED BOKO HARAM CAMPS/CLOTHES, LEATHER BAGS AND AN EMPTY CARTON OF SURGICAL GLOVES
  • Embargoed: 29th November 2013 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Nigeria
  • Country: Nigeria
  • Topics: Crime,Conflict,People
  • Reuters ID: LVAF34F0OR9XB4O088Y5GPOCEJ1Z
  • Story Text: In a gloomy hilltop cave in northeast Nigeria where she was being held captive, Christian teenager Hajja had a knife pressed to her throat by an Islamist militant who gave her a choice: convert to Islam, or die.
    Two gunmen from Islamist sect Boko Haram, the militant group that has been designated as "Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorists" by the United States on Wednesday (November 13), kidnapped Hajja in July while she was picking corn near her village in the Gwoza hills, a remote part of the northeast where President Goodluck Jonathan's military offensive is struggling to contain them.
    "I lived in a village in Gwoza and one day I went up the hills to get grains for my grandmother, then I saw the insurgents and they took me with them to their camp further up the hills," Hajja, 19, told Reuters in an exclusive interview, declining to give her second name to protect family members still in Gwoza.
    In a new twist to an increasingly vicious insurgency, Boko Haram have started abducting Christian women and forcing them to convert to Islam, before marrying them off to commanders, a tactic eerily reminiscent of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda last decade.
    The three months Hajja spent with a 14-man guerrilla unit, cooking and cleaning for them as a slave, before she escaped, give her a rare glimpse into how the Islamists have changed tack in the face of military pressure against them once again.
    Nigerian security officials have known for some time that the Islamists are now hiding out around the Mandara Mountains near Gwoza, along the Cameroon border, from where they launch increasingly deadly attacks on Nigerian forces and civilians.
    The rugged mountain terrain not dissimilar to the Taliban's mountain hideouts and caves in Afghanistan, but on a smaller scale, has proved a much better base for them than the flatter semi-deserts they controlled before the offensive began in May.
    It is a fitting tactic for an Islamist movement that once called itself the 'Nigerian Taliban'.
    Islamist sect Boko Haram has killed thousands during a four year insurgency against the state, targeting the police and military, politicians, then turning on minority Christians in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north.
    But the military offensive against them, and the fact that large numbers of civilians vigilantes have joined it, has triggered a backlash against civilians, with hundreds killed in the past few weeks.
    Hajja spent three months with a fourteen person unit of Boko Haram, dragged through the winding rocky mountain paths and sleeping in caves dug into the hills, a landscape unfamiliar to most Nigerian soldiers in a largely flat West African country that has given the insurgents an advantage.
    She became a Muslim, cooked for the men, carried ammunition during one attack on a police outpost and nearly married one of the insurgents before engineering a dramatic escape.
    "When they captured me initially I thought I was going to die because I was tied up with a rope around my neck and they removed a knife to slaughter me but they later left me alone," Hajja said in the local Hausa language from a house in Abuja.? Dozens of other teenage girls remain in captivity, Gwoza residents say. Some have been married to commanders in moves that recall Kony's LRA, which abducted thousands of girls as to take as "wives" in northern Uganda over its 20-year conflict starting in 1986.
    Boko Haram, who never talk to press except through rare statements or videos delivered to northeastern journalists, were not available for comment.
    In May, President Jonathan resolved to crush Boko Haram, declaring a state of emergency in three states in the northeast and extending emergency rule for a further six months.
    Forced out of towns and cities, militants have mostly retreated to mountains and forests on the Cameroon border.
    When contacted the army commanders in Borno state denied Boko Haram had any control over the Gwoza mountain region.
    Even so, a Nigerian General asked Cameroon this month to help fight Boko Haram in border regions and there are signs military tactics aren't stemming the bloodshed.
    According to one security source, in the five months after Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the northeast there were 1,708 deaths from 83 violent clashes, compared with 667 deaths from 117 incidents in the five months earlier.
    The attacks have increasingly been focused in Borno state, the origin of Boko Haram's insurgency and still the epicentre of violence.
    ? Around 51 percent of clashes occurred in Borno between January and March, rising to 65 percent in April and June and 72 percent in July and September, suggesting Jonathan's offensive has limited the spread of attacks, even as the death count rises.
    These cases are those that have been officially reported or collaborated from security sources and witnesses.
    ? The actual death tolls are likely to be far higher, the source said.
    Pushing the conflict into poor rural regions, like Gwoza where Hajja was taken, poses the risk of radicalising more disenchanted youths and drawing more people into the violence.
    Insurgents move freely in the hills and even in Gwoza town and beyond, Hajja says. Fighters made trips to collect cash, ammunition and weapons from the Sambisa Game Reserve, a forested region in Borno known to contain Boko Haram camps.
    Informants, mostly farmers, would warn the unit if a military patrol was coming and some soldiers or members of the civilian JTF supported the group, Hajja said. The military deny any soldiers sympathise with Boko Haram.
    High level Boko Haram commanders would occasionally meet with the group in the hills to discuss operations.
    Hajja says these commanders came from the state capital Maiduguri and relayed messages to several cells operating in the hills.
    The group was led by a man called Ibrahim Tada Nglayike and his wife, who Hajja says was the only woman in the group but one of the most brutal.
    Hajja witnessed her cut the throat of a member of a vigilante task force, dozens of which have been set-up in recent months, known as the 'civilian JTF'.
    On one mission, Hajja was sent to stand in a field outside a village to attract the attention of a group of civilian JTF. When the five men approached they were ambushed.
    She says the long-bearded insurgents lived a basic lifestyle, eating corn, millet and occasionally meat from animals they stole and she slaughtered.
    The group, armed with AK47 rifles and pistols stolen from police they killed, moved everyday around the hills to avoid being tracked by the army and slept in the caves to shelter from the cold and for protection against army air assaults.
    Hajja said while she was with the unit, it carried out dozens of attacks, killing police and anyone suspected of aiding authorities, particularly the civilian JTF, who the insurgents consider treacherous, as many are Muslims.
    She eventually escaped by feigning a debilitating stomach ache for three days. The insurgents suspected she might have been promiscuous and was pregnant, so sent her to hospital with Nglayike's mother for checks, believing her too ill to flee.
    "I managed to escape when I pretended that I was having stomach ache for about a week. So when they discovered I was having prolonged illness, they said that most of the Christian girls are harlots and that they should bring me down to the hospital so I can be tested and married off to one of the insurgent's brother. So, from there I escaped," Hajja said.? When Hajja was in a well populated area with only an two women to control her, she threatened to get her captors arrested, the women panicked and fled, allowing Hajja to escape and eventually return to her parents.
    "When we came to the hospital it was locked because there was nobody there so we went to the house of an uncle of one of the insurgents but when the uncle discovered I was a Christian he said he was not going to host a Christian in his house so instead we went to the house of the woman that brought me to the hospital. The following day along the way, I sat down and said I was not going anywhere with them and when the woman insisted I said I will alert the security people and she ran away. Then I looked for Christians and asked them to take me to a village called Doka," Hajja added.
    Residents in the northeast claim the primary reason why Boko Haram cannot be stopped is because they have high-level political backers, who fund the group's operations.
    Politicians and military commanders in the northeast strongly deny this but Jonathan has said in the past that Boko Haram has insiders within the government and the army.
    Insurgents regularly loot markets and rob banks to fund operations and have support from Islamist groups in the Sahel.
    The longer the insurgency goes on, southern Christian, Jonathan will come under increasing criticism from his northern opponents as elections in early 2015 draw closer.
    He risks growing resentment from a northern population who believe he is out of touch with their desperate situation.
    It is also becoming a drain on Africa's second largest economy.
    Nigeria budgeted 950 billion naira (6 billion US dollars) for security this year, around 20 percent of total spending.
    Ends.
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