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| Two of the women who survived Boko Haram’s attempts to have them carry out ‘suicide missions’. Photograph: Ruth Maclean for the Guardian |
When Boko Haram fighters kidnapped 17-year-old Nadia and took her to their camp, their commander noticed her straight away. She was squatting with dozens of other abducted women in front of him, listening to his lecture.
The commander, whose name she never learned, “was dirty, ugly, dark-skinned and had a beard. He had a lot of hair on his head like a madman,” Nadia remembered. He looked mean. And he wanted her as a second wife.
Three months later, Nadia woke up one morning to find her body strapped with explosives. She had been drugged the night before. The commander’s men pushed her on to a motorbike, and dropped her and two others near Gamboro, a town in Borno, the Nigerian state hit worst by the Boko Haram insurgency.
The mission they had been given: to blow themselves up in as big a crowd as they could find.
Boko Haram, the terrorist group best known for kidnapping hundreds of schoolgirls from the village of Chibok in the middle of the night three years ago, has been under heavy attack from the Nigerian military in recent months.
But as their longed-for “caliphate” across north-eastern Nigeria has shrunk, the number of bomb attacks has increased, with the insurgents increasingly sending the women and children they have abducted to blow themselves up.
The week before Nadia was abducted, Boko Haram had attacked her village. Hiding behind her house, she had listened as they searched for her father, screamed at her mother for trying to hide him, and finally found and shot him.
When the commander announced to Nadia that he was making her his concubine, she was told she was one of the “lucky few” to be selected. But terrified as she was, Nadia had no intention of going along with it.
“He came that night and tried to rape me,” she said, her diamante earrings glinting through her pale blue hijab. “We wrestled seriously. I thought, this is a life-or-death situation, he probably has an STD which would kill me anyway, so I might as well die honourably. I used all my strength to fight him, and he was so angry when he couldn’t succeed in raping me. In the morning he went out and called his boys, and told them to take me out and flog me.”
After more death threats and another rape attempt, he tried a different tack: talking to her, trying to persuade her to accept the marriage. But after three months of cajoling, he had had enough, and decided to get rid of her.
That was how Nadia found herself approaching a checkpoint run by the civilian joint taskforce (CJTF), a paramilitary group helping fight Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria, trying to keep her arms out from her sides and not to swing them, to avoid accidentally detonating the bomb strapped to her waist.
When the men at the checkpoint saw the three women approaching, they shouted at them to stop. The women had prepared for this moment – in the minutes after their captors had left them, they had agreed to try to hand themselves in.
“We stopped. We shouted: ‘We’re carrying bombs, we were forced to,’ and we lifted up our veils and showed them the belts,” she said.
They were fortunate: no gun was raised to shoot them. The men called the military and after a 40-minute wait, standing still under a tree, soldiers came and removed the bombs from their bodies.
“I was so happy; we were smiling and laughing,” Nadia said. “We had survived.”
Many do not survive: according to figures collated by the Long War Journal, 154 bombers have died in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad since 2014, and this is a conservative estimate, as many attacks go unreported in the media.
When preparing someone for a “suicide” mission, Boko Haram members treat the bomber as if they are already dead, preparing the body as if for their own funeral.
“What they normally do is to dress you very beautifully, and put henna on your hands,” said Aisha, who was “married” to Boko Haram’s fourth-in-command and recently escaped. She saw many women and children recruited and sent on such missions.
This happened to Fatima, now 20, before she was sent to blow herself up in 2015. “They tie your hair back to prepare you for death,” she said, her voice quiet as she removed her red headscarf to show how her hair was braided off her face, as is the custom in funeral rites.
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