If you need to use the toilet, they’d follow you || Women rescued from Sambisa forest, narrate ordeal in Boko Haram captivity

by Anike Jacobs

Some of the hundreds of women who were rescued last week from the Boko Haram camp in Sambisa Forest have narrated the ordeal they went through while in captivity.

They told their stories to reporters on Sunday, May 3, at a refugee camp in Yola, Adamawa State.

“They didn’t allow us to move an inch,” said one of the freed women, Asabe Umaru, describing her captivity. “If you needed the toilet, they followed you. We were kept in one place. We were under bondage. We thank God to be alive today. We thank the Nigerian army for saving our lives. When we saw the soldiers we raised our hands and shouted for help. Boko Haram who were guarding us started stoning us so we would follow them to another hideout, but we refused because we were sure the soldiers would rescue us,” Umaru, a 24 year-old mother of two, told Reuters.

“Every day we witnessed the death of one of us and waited for our turn,” Mrs. Umaru added.

Another freed captive, Cecilia Abel, said her husband and first son had been killed in her presence before the militia forced her and her remaining eight children into the forest.

For two weeks before the military arrived she had barely eaten.

“We were fed only ground dry maize in the afternoons. It was not good for human consumption,” she said. “Many of us that were captured died in Sambisa Forest. Even after our rescue about 10 died on our way to this place.”

Two hundred and seventy-five women and children, some with heads or limbs in bandages, arrived in the refugee camp late on Saturday.

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