A girls simply known as Fati to protect her identity has spoken about the horrors of the Boko Haram camp.
The 16-year-old escapee has explained why there’s a spike in female suicide bombers, especially young girls.
The teenager claims that it’s not because they are brainwashed but rather because the hunger, suffering and sexual abuse are just too much to bear. She explained that they were literally begging to become suicide bombers to escape the hard life. In an interview with CNN she said:
“They came to us to pick us. They would ask, ‘Who wants to be a suicide bomber?’ The girls would shout, ‘me, me, me.’ They were fighting to do the suicide bombings,”
“It was just because they want to run away from Boko Haram. If they give them a suicide bomb, then maybe they would meet soldiers, tell them, ‘I have a bomb on me’ and they could remove the bomb. They can run away.”
Fati had been captured when her village was raided by Boko Haram terrorists in 2014. She explained some of her experiences in the Boko Haram camp.
“We said, ‘No, we are too small; we don’t want to get married, so they married us by force,” she said, explaining that after he raped her for the first time, her abuser gave her a wedding present – a purple and brown dress with a matching headscarf that she would wear for the next two years.
While under his control, she was whisked from hideout to hideout in order to evade security forces. She recalled that she met girls even younger than her in Sambisa Forest, some of whom were the abducted Chibok schoolgirls.
She was rescued by Cameroonian forces and is now in Minawo, a refugee camp. She has also been reunited with her mother.
“Now that I have escaped, I thank God, and I am always praying to God that I was able to escape. It is terrible what Boko Haram is doing.”