Colin Freeman

Ransom money has turned Boko Haram into Nigeria’s Cosa Nostra

Amina Ahmed counts herself as one of the lucky ones, or just about. When Boko Haram staged a mass kidnapping in her home town of Gwoza, northern Nigeria, three years ago, she and other female captives were sorted into two different categories of chattel.

The less favoured ones were conscripted as cannon fodder against the Nigerian army, with suicide bombs strapped to their waists. The others became ‘servants to the Emir’s soldiers’ – which, Amina discovered, was Islamist-speak for sex slave. During her two years in captivity, she was forced to sleep with at least 10 different men. She’d shudder whenever she heard their motorbikes roaring into camp.

Eight months ago, she escaped to an IDP (internally displaced person) camp in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri. But there are, she says, drawbacks to still being alive. Now aged 16, she last set foot in a classroom four years ago. And without parents to pay for school – her father is dead and her mother’s whereabouts unknown – her dreams of being a doctor, or even having her own roof over her head, are slipping away.

‘I see my old friends going to school and I feel jealous,’ she says, begging me and a British aid worker to find her a school place. ‘At times, I almost feel like going back to Boko Haram in the bush – there is nobody to look after me here.’

Amina’s name has been changed to protect her identity as a rape victim. Not that you would have heard of her – nor, most likely, the looting, pillage and rape inflicted on Gwoza. There are tens of thousands of children like her in northern Nigeria, but unlike the Chibok girls, the 276 pupils abducted back in 2014, most don’t enjoy the patronage of a celebrity-backed Twitter campaign like #BringBackOurGirls.

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Written by
Colin Freeman

Colin Freeman is former chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph and author of ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The mission to rescue the hostages the world forgot.’

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