A 16-year-old girl identified as Fati, who regained freedom after spending two years in Boko Haram’s captivity, has explained how teenage girls volunteer to go on suicide missions in order to escape molestation and other forms of hardship under the sect.
Fati, whose name was changed to protect her identity, said young girls fight to strap on a bomb, not because they were brainwashed by their captors but because the relentless hunger and sexual abuse became too much to bear.
“They came to us to pick us. They would ask, ‘Who wants to be a suicide bomber?’ The girls would shout, ‘me, me, me.’ They were fighting to do the suicide bombings,” Fati told CNN.
“It was just because they want to run away from Boko Haram. If they give them a suicide bomb, then maybe they would meet soldiers, tell them, ‘I have a bomb on me’ and they could remove the bomb. They can run away.”
The teenager who was kidnapped from her village by the insurgents shared her experience with CNN at a refugee camp in Cameroon.
(Punch)
