Ian Birrell

Every horror imaginable

Patience Ibrahim’s eyewitness account of the savagery of the Nigerian Islamists is one of the most shocking on record

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  • A Gift from Darkness: How I Escaped with My Daughter from Boko Haram

    Patience Ibrahim and Andrea C. Hoffmann

    Little, Brown, pp. 275

  • The Chibok Girls

    Helon Habila

    Penguin, pp. 119

The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being urged to convert to Islam with machetes pressed to their necks. They did their best to gabble words that sounded like the prayers they were being taught before one fighter noticed a captive with a swollen belly.

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