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. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she insisted, spreading her hands over her belly in an instinctive reaction that only showed she was lying.
The most senior of the armed men, who looked barely 20 years old, ordered her to lie down on the ground. ‘We don’t bring any Christian babies into the world here,’ he screamed. Then he stripped off the shaking woman’s clothes, slit open her stomach with his machete, ripped out the unborn baby and threw it in a field behind him. ‘All Christian children must die,’ said the killer, as the woman bled into the grass beside him.
This obscene scene is recounted by Patience Ibrahim, captured a few days earlier. This was the young Christian’s second time held by Boko Haram, which mounted regular raids on villages to kill men, grab women and steal possessions. She had already seen her first husband shot, her blind mother butchered by the gangsters and been raped against a tree. And watching this latest atrocity, she knew that inside her own womb was the growing child of her second husband.
Ibrahim’s escape from the savage jihadists who have devastated northern Nigeria is nothing short of miraculous. She gets away once, only to be caught in nets strung across bushes. Then a kindly captor aids a second escape and she reaches nearby Cameroon, where she meets her husband again. But he is decapitated in another awful attack; she comes across his head with its ‘empty, lifeless gaze’ beside the corpse.
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