by Kolapo Olapoju

A report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), claims that women and girls taken by Islamic terrorist sect, Boko Haram, are used in combat operations, forced to lure men into ambush and to marry their abductors.

The report was released on Monday, 27 October, after HRW interviewed former hostages of the militants, who recounted the physical and psychological abuse they suffered, while in captive.

The 63-page report, “Those Terrible Weeks in Their Camp’: Boko Haram Violence against Women and Girls in Northeast Nigeria”, is based on interviews with more 46 victims and witnesses of Boko Haram abductions, including some girls who escaped the kidnapping from Chibok secondary school in Borno.

One of the victims, a 19-year-old told HRW about how she was forced to lie in the grass and hold bullets while the militants fought Nigerian troops.

“When security forces arrived at the scene and began to shoot at us, I fell down in fright. The insurgents dragged me along on the ground as they fled back to camp.”

In another operation, the report stated that the teenager was told to approach a group of five men and lure them to where the Boko Haram militants were hiding. They ambushed the men, tied them up and slit the throats of four of them, before handing the knife to her and ordered her to kill the fifth man.

She said, “I was shaking with horror and couldn’t do it. The camp leader’s wife took the knife and killed him.”

Many of the abductees described how they were assaulted, raped, and forced into marriage to the militants after being made to convert to Islam.

Another victim, aged 15, said she complained that she was too young to marry one of the militants but a Boko Haram commander dismissed her protests, saying his five-year-old daughter had married the previous year.

Human Rights Watch said more than 500 women and girls have been abducted since the start of the insurgency in 2009, although other estimates put the figure in the high hundreds.

In the camps, they described seeing other women and children, infants and others as old as 65 – but were unable to say whether all of them had also been kidnapped.

They were made to cook, clean and perform household chores. Some were forced to carry stolen goods seized by the insurgents after attacks.

According to Daniel Bekele, Africa director at HRW, “The Nigerian government and its allies need to step up their efforts to put an end to these brutal abductions and provide for the medical, psychological, and social needs of the women and girls who have managed to escape.”