3 girls forced to be Boko Haram bombers tell their stories

Boko Haram militants using children especially girls as bombers is not a new story. The gruesome tale is one that has been told by many people in different ways.

In a recent interview with New York Times, many of the girls that survived revealed what they went through. Below are some of their stories:

1. 15-year-old Aisha

“They said to me, ‘Are you going to sleep with us, or do you want to go on a mission?’” Aisha says narrating her story.

She fled her home with her father and 10-year-old brother, but Boko Haram caught them. The fighters killed her father and, soon after, she watched them strap a bomb to her brother, squeeze him between two militants on a motorbike and speed away.

The two militants returned without him, cheering. Her little brother had blown up soldiers at a barracks, she learned. The militants told her not to cry for him. “He killed wicked people,” they told her.

Later, they tied a bomb on her, too, instructing her to head toward the same barracks. Like some of the other girls, Aisha said she had considered walking off to an isolated spot and pressing the detonator, far from other people, to avoid hurting anyone else.

Instead, she approached the soldiers and persuaded them to remove the explosives from her body, delicately.

“I told them, ‘My brother was here and killed some of your men,’” she said. “My brother wasn’t sensible enough to know he didn’t have to do it. He was only a small child.”

READ ALSO: Four bombers die on a failed mission in Maiduguri

2. 14-year-old Maimuma

The militants sometimes tried to trick the girls, hoping to convince them they would not be harmed in the attacks.

Maimuma was told that the moment she hit the detonator, the bomb would leap from her body and land in the crowd. She didn’t believe it, especially after militants prepared her hair in a traditional burial style.

“I knew very well that bomb would kill me,” she said.

But there was little she could do. They tied an explosive belt around her waist and dropped her along a road. Follow it to where the soldiers are, they told her. Act like a woman, they said. Look attractive. Wait until you’re very close to them. Then press the button.

She tried to keep her composure until she was out of sight. The explosives were heavy and the detonator – a device that looked like a small radio – was hot against her waist, she recalled. She wanted to remove the belt, but was terrified of accidentally setting it off.

She began to cry. Some passers-by spotted her sobbing on the road and approached. She told them Boko Haram had tied a bomb under her gown. They sprinted away. Others approached, but they too fled when she told them her problem.

“They came one after another,” she said. “I tried to run after them and they told me they would kill me if I kept coming.”

After a few minutes, a group of soldiers arrived, telling her to keep her distance and put her hands in the air. A soldier came over to gingerly remove the device. It seemed to take forever. Her arms grew tired as she held them overhead. Finally, the belt was off.

“Some people see me as part of Boko Haram. Some people see me as a hero," she concluded.

READ ALSO: Many dead as 3 Boko Haram bombers attack Maiduguri

3. Hadiza

“I don’t know how to get this thing off me,” Hadiza, 16, recalled saying as she headed out on her mission.

“What are you going to do with yours?” she asked the 12-year-old girl next to her, who was also wearing a bomb.

“I’m going to go off by myself and blow myself up,” the girl responded hopelessly.

When Hadiza and the 12-year-old girl approached a checkpoint, she was scared of what the soldiers might do.

Hadiza told the younger girl to wait by a tree in the distance while she explained their predicament to the soldiers.

She knew the girl would raise suspicion because she was too young to be walking in the bush without a parent.

“She was such a small girl,” Hadiza said.

The soldiers believed her and helped the girls take off their explosives belts before splitting them up for questioning.

Hadiza was eventually taken to a camp for displaced people. She still doesn’t know where her mother is, or if she is even alive. But her father showed up at the camp a few weeks after she did. When she told him what happened, he cried, both horrified and relieved.

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Legit.ng earlier reported that two diaries kept by four of the kidnapped Chibok girls has given some much needed insight into the abduction saga that shook the world in 2014.

Nigerian journalist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani in partnership with the Murtala Muhammed Foundation had a conversation with one of the girls who kept the diaries, Naomi Adamu, which was published by the BBC.

Mother of Chibok girl laments - on Legit.ng TV.

Source: Legit.ng