Tag Archives: Boko Haram

Nigerian soldiers find Chibok girl kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014

Bring Back Our Girls campaigners

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigerian soldiers have found a schoolgirl who was one of more than 200 pupils kidnapped by Islamist militant group Boko Haram from their school in the northeastern town of Chibok in April 2014, an army spokesman said on Thursday.

The troops had found Rakiya Abubkar wandering around near Algarno, a former Boko Haram stronghold, the spokesman said. She had a six-month-old baby with her.

A total of 276 schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram from Chibok in 2014 in one of the most infamous actions of their insurgency. More than 20 were released in October in a deal brokered by the International Red Cross. Others have escaped or been rescued but about 200 are believed to be still in captivity.

Boko Haram has killed 15,000 people and displaced more than two million during a seven-year-old insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria.

The group controlled an area about the size of Belgium in early 2015 but has been pushed out of most of that territory over the last year by Nigeria’s army and troops from neighbouring countries.

Last month, the army said it had seized a key Boko Haram camp in its last enclave in Nigeria in the vast Sambisa forest. The jihadists still stage suicide bombings in northeastern areas and in neighbouring Niger and Cameroon.

(Reporting by Lanre Ola, Alexis Akwagyiram and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Dominic Evans)

Famine may have killed 2,000 people in parts of Nigeria cut off from aid by Boko Haram

Nigeria to release $1 billion from excess oil account to fight Boko Haram

DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than 2,000 people may have died of famine this year in parts of northeast Nigeria which cannot be reached by aid agencies due to an insurgency by Islamic militant group Boko Haram, hunger experts said on Tuesday.

The deaths occurred in the town of Bama in Nigeria’s Borno state, the jihadists’ former stronghold, a report by the U.S.-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) said.

While food aid is staving off famine for people uprooted by conflict who can be reached, the outlook is bleak for those in parts of the northeast cut off from help, according to FEWS NET.

“The risk of famine in inaccessible areas of Borno State will remain high over the coming year,” the report said.

“In a worst-case scenario, where conflict cuts off areas that are currently accessible and dependent on assistance, the likelihood of famine in these areas would be high,” it added.

Around 4.7 million people are in need of emergency food aid in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states – nearly two-thirds of them in Borno alone – according to FEWS NET.

Some 400,000 children are at risk from famine in the three states, 75,000 of whom could die from hunger within months, the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF) said in September.

Yet the current humanitarian response is insufficient amid extreme levels of food insecurity, and only one million people have received food aid this year, FEWS NET said.

Almost four in five of the 1.4 million displaced Nigerians in Borno state are living in local communities, where tensions are rising in many families as food runs short.

Improving security has enabled aid agencies this year to reach some areas that were previously cut off, but many remain unreachable due to the ongoing violence and lack of security.

Boko Haram militants have killed about 15,000 people and displaced 2.4 million across Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria during a seven-year campaign to create an Islamist caliphate.

Nigeria’s army has pushed the Islamist group back to its base in Sambisa forest in the past few months, but the militants still often stage raids and suicide bombings.

(Reporting By Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Nigeria’s presidency says aid agencies overstating northeast hunger

girl eats meal in front of New Prison camp in Nigeria

ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria said on Monday that aid agencies, including the United Nations, were exaggerating the levels of hunger in the strife-torn northeast to get more funding from international donors.

In the last few months, Boko Haram insurgents, who have killed 15,000 people and displaced two million since 2009, have been driven back from an area the size of Belgium, revealing thousands of people that aid agencies say are near starvation.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman said “hyperbolic claims” were being made by, among others, U.N. agencies about the region, where the United Nations says some 75,000 children are at risk of starving to death in the next few months.

“We are concerned about the blatant attempts to whip up a nonexistent fear of mass starvation by some aid agencies, a type of hype that does not provide solution to the situation on the ground but more to do with calculations for operations financing locally and abroad,” an emailed statement from Garba Shehu said.

“In a recent instance, one arm of the United Nations screamed that 100,000 people will die due to starvation next year. A different group says a million will die,” he said.

On Friday, the U.N. said it had doubled its humanitarian funding appeal for northeast Nigeria to $1 billion to reach nearly 7 million people it said needed life-saving help.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has worked out an aid plan “in close cooperation with the government”, its deputy humanitarian coordinator Peter Lundberg said on Monday.

“The reality is that if we don’t receive the funding we require many thousands of people will die,” he said.

Shehu said government agencies were distributing food, deploying medical teams and providing education for children in camps for people who had fled their homes, noting that they would continue to work closely with international aid agencies.

Nigeria has Africa’s largest economy but is grappling with its first recession in 25 years as oil prices fall. Buhari’s administration has been criticized in the media for its handling of the economy and needing aid despite its oil wealth.

(Reporting by Felix Onuah; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Boko Haram attacks destroy farm communities, bring famine risk

Nigerian Women and Children waiting at a nutrition clinic

By Alexis Akwagyiram

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Fati Adamu has not seen three of her six children nor her husband since Boko Haram militants attacked her hometown in northeast Nigeria in an hail of bullets.

Two years on, she is among thousands of refugees at the Bakassi camp in Maiduguri, the city worst hit by a seven-year-old insurgency that has forced more than two million people to flee their homes.

The United Nations says 400,000 children are now at risk from a famine in the northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe – 75,000 of whom could die from hunger within the next few months.

A push against the jihadists by the Nigerian army and soldiers from neighboring countries has enabled troops to enter remote parts of the northeast in the last few months, revealing tens of thousands on the brink of starvation and countless families torn apart.

“I don’t know if they are dead or alive,” Adamu, 35, said of her missing relatives.

There is a renewed threat of Boko Haram attacks. The start of the dry season has seen a surge in suicide bombings, some of which have targeted camps, including one at Bakassi in October which killed five people.

The World Food Programme said it provides food aid to 450,000 people in Borno and Yobe. Some 200,000 of them receive 17,000 naira each month to buy food, soon to rise to 23,000.

At least 15 camps, mostly on the outskirts of Maiduguru, the Borno state capital, are home to thousands of people unable to return home and surviving on food rations.

At one known as New Prison, women and children visibly outnumber men, many of whom were killed by Boko Haram or are missing.

One man — 45-year-old Bukaralhaji Bukar, who has eight children from his two wives — said the food he buys with the monthly stipend finishes within two weeks.

“We are suffering. It is not enough,” said Bukar, who begs on the street to make money.

In the center of Maiduguri, life seems to be returning to normal. Food markets are bustling but soldiers in pick-ups clutching rifles are reminders of the need for vigilance.

MALNOURISHED CHILDREN

In a ward in Molai district near the Bakassi camp, the air is filled with the sound of crying babies and the gurgle of those who lack the energy to cry. Some, whose skin clings tightly to their bones, are silent – too weary to even raise their heads.

“Many of them are malnourished, which is already bad enough, but they also develop things like malaria which further worsens their illnesses because they can’t eat and start vomiting,” said Dr Iasac Bot, who works at the unit overseen by the charity Save the Children.

Children have conditions ranging from diarrhea and pneumonia to bacterial infections and skin infections.

Hauwa Malu, 20, fled with her husband and their two-week-old daughter, Miriam, from her village in Jere after Boko Haram militants burned the farming community to the ground and took their cattle.

Miriam, now aged 10 months, has suffered from fevers, a persistent cough and is malnourished. Her mother said they have been left without a home or livelihood.

Tim Vaessen of the Food and Agriculture Organization said a failure to restore their ability to farm would in the long term mean displaced people would depend on expensive food aid.

“They would remain in these camps, they would become easy targets for other armed groups and they might have to migrate again – even up to Europe,” he said.

(Reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram, Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Hunger ‘deadlier than violence’ in Boko Haram-hit northeast Nigeria

Writings describing Boko Haram are seen on the wall along a street in Bama, in Borno, Nigeria

By Kieran Guilbert

DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Living conditions for people uprooted by Boko Haram violence and seeking refuge in camps and towns across northeast Nigeria are more deadly than the conflict between the Islamist militants and the army, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Wednesday.

Hunger and malnutrition is widespread among the displaced in Borno State, not just in remote, previously inaccessible areas, but also in the capital Maiduguri, the medical aid group said.

Coordination of relief efforts must be drastically improved and food aid urgently delivered to people in need across Borno, where the humanitarian situation is reaching “catastrophic levels”, said MSF emergency program manager Natalie Roberts.

“It is shocking to see so many people malnourished in Maiduguri, not just in isolated and hard-to-reach areas,” Roberts told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

“Aid actors have access, and there has been no Boko Haram presence for the last few years, but people are starving to death inside Maiduguri. Millions are in a nutrition crisis.”

MSF said it had recently gained access to Ngala and Gambaru, towns previously cut off from aid, where tens of thousands of people have little or nothing to eat and at least one in 10 children are suffering from life-threatening malnutrition.

Yet the medical charity said it was most concerned about the situation in Maiduguri, where malnutrition rates in some parts of the city are as high as those seen in conflict-hit areas.

Boko Haram violence has left more than 65,000 people living in famine in the northeast, with one million others at risk, and more than half of children under five are malnourished in some areas of Borno, several aid groups said last week.

Many women in aid camps in the northeast are resorting to selling sex in exchange for food and money with which to feed their families, medical charity International Medical Corps and Nigerian research group NOI Polls said this week.

Roberts said the aid response across Borno was insufficient and uncoordinated, leaving many people without any assistance.

“Civilians are not receiving aid, and find themselves trapped between Boko Haram and the military’s operations.”

The Islamist militant group has killed about 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million in Nigeria in a seven-year insurgency aimed at creating a state adhering to Islamic laws.

A military offensive has driven Boko Haram from much of the territory it held in northern Nigeria, but the militants have continued to carry out suicide bombings and raids in northeast Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

(Reporting by Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Nigerian army commander: only weeks left for Boko Haram

Major General Lucky Irabor, commander of "Operation Lafiya Dole",

By Ulf Laessing and Lanre Ola

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigeria’s army expects to seize Boko Haram’s last few strongholds in the northeast over the next few weeks, the commander in charge of crushing the jihadist group’s seven-year insurgency said on Wednesday.

The army missed a December deadline set by President Muhammadu Buhari to wipe out the group, which wants to set up an Islamic caliphate in the area around Lake Chad, but has retaken most of its territory – at one point the size of Belgium.

Major General Lucky Irabor, commander of the operation, said the jihadists were now holed up in a few pockets of the Sambisa forest – where more than 200 girls kidnapped from the town of Chibok in 2014 are believed to be held – and two areas near Lake Chad and would be flushed out “within weeks”.

Despite the set-backs, Boko Haram still manages to stage regular suicide bombings in Nigeria and neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon. Since 2009, more than 15,000 people have been killed, 2.3 million displaced and the local economy decimated.

“Almost all of the locations held by the Boko Haram terrorists have been reclaimed. We are talking only of a few villages and towns,” Irabor said in an interview at his base in Maiduguri in Borno state, birth place of the insurgency.

Much of the success is down to better military cooperation with Nigeria’s neighbors, especially Chad, whose forces have been attacking Boko Haram fighters fleeing across the border.

“There are joint operations. My commanders have an exchange with local commanders across the borders. Because of the collaborations we’ve had Boko Haram has been boxed in and in a few weeks you will hear good news,” he said.

He said the jihadists, who pledged loyalty to Islamic State last year, were still controlling Abadan and Malafatori, two towns near Lake Chad, apart from their main base in the Sambisa forest, south of Maidguri.

The army was planning a new push into Sambisa after abandoning an attempt due to torrential rain, he said.

“Earlier on this year we had a major operation in the Sambisa,” he said. “Gains were made but unfortunately the weather conditions became such that we to pull out waiting for more favorable conditions.”

He said the army had rescued some 20,000 people from Boko Haram, a fraction of the 2.2 million UNICEF said last week remained trapped in the region around Lake Chad.

LEADER “WOUNDED”

Irabor’s base on the outskirts of Maiduguri, a sprawling military complex with rows of residential blocks for officers, is the most visible sign of a shake-up introduced by Buhari, a former military ruler.

Under his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, the army had a reputation for being poorly equipped and running away in the face of Boko Haram assaults.

Britain and other countries have recently increased military assistance, and two Westerners wearing flat jackets could be seen jogging in the compound.

U.S. officials told Reuters in May that Washington, which blocked arms sales under Jonathan amid concerns about rights abuses, wants to sell up to 12 A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft to Nigeria although Congress needs to approve the deal.

Irabor has set up a human rights desk to address the issue.

“The code of conduct is quite clear. Human rights issues are taken quite seriously,” he said.

He said that Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau had recently been wounded, but backed off an Air Force statement this month suggesting he had been killed in an airstrike.

“Shekau was wounded. That’s what I can confirm, but as to whether he is dead that I cannot at the moment confirm.”

Boko Haram, which normally communicates via video or audio clips posted on the Internet, has said nothing since the Aug. 24 Air Force statement about Shekau being hurt.

(Editing by Ed Cropley and Louise Ireland)

As Kerry lands in Nigeria, air force says top Boko Haram fighters killed

Boko Haram

By Lesley Wroughton

SOKOTO, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigeria’s air force said it had killed a number of senior Boko Haram fighters and possibly their overall leader, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks on tackling the militants.

Government planes attacked the Islamist group inside the Sambisa forest in its northeast heartland on Friday, the air force said, adding that it had only just confirmed details of the impact of the raid.

“Their leader, so called ‘Abubakar Shekau’, is believed to be fatally wounded on his shoulders,” the statement by military spokesman Colonel Sani Kukasheka Usman added, without going into details on the source of its information.

Kerry did not make a direct reference to the reported air raid on his arrival on Tuesday, but his administration has paid close attention to the fight against a militant group that has declared allegiance to Islamic State and destabilized a whole region by attacking Nigeria’s neighbors.

On his first stop in the northern city of Sokoto, the top U.S. diplomat said the struggle against Boko Haram would only succeed if it tackled the reasons why people join militant groups and gained the public’s trust.

“It is understandable that, in the wake of terrorist activity, some are tempted to crack down on anyone and everyone who could theoretically pose some sort of threat. But extremism can’t be defeated through repression or fear,” he said.

U.S. PLANES

Nigeria has been pushing the United States to sell it aircraft to take on Boko Haram – a group that emerged in northeast Borno region seven years ago. The militants have killed an estimated 15,000 people in their fight to set up an Islamist state.

Under Nigeria’s last president, Goodluck Jonathan, the United States had blocked arms sales and ended training of Nigerian troops partly over human rights concerns such as treatment of captured insurgents.

But the new administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has argued its human rights record has improved significantly enough to lift the blockade.

In May, U.S. officials told Reuters that Washington wanted to sell up to 12 A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft to Nigeria in recognition of Buhari’s reform of the country’s army. Congress needs to approve the deal.

Kerry said Buhari had made “a strong start at all levels of government” since taking office in May 2015, without referring specifically to rights abuses.

Kerry was due to visit Buhari later in the capital Abuja, officials said.

There was no immediate reaction from Boko Haram, which communicates with the media only by videos. The military has reported the death of Boko Haram’s Shekau in the past, only to have a man purporting to be him appear later, apparently unharmed, making video statements.

There have been recent signs of rifts between at least parts of Boko Haram and Islamic State. The global militant organization announced a new leader for what it described as its West African operations this month – an account that Abubakar Shekau appeared to contradict in a later video message.

(Additional reporting by Camillus Eboh; Writing by Chijioke Ohuocha and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Economic downturn, Islamist attacks cause hunger to spread in Nigeria

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Nigeria’s economic slowdown, compounded by Boko Haram attacks, could mean 5.5 million people needing food aid in the volatile northeast by next month, double the current number, the United Nations warned on Friday.

As government troops advance against the militants, the somewhat better access for aid workers under military escort to Borno and Yobe states has exposed “catastrophic levels” of suffering and a “vast regional crisis”, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.

Inflation and soaring food prices come at a time when people have little left from the last harvest, the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) said.

“Because of Nigeria’s economic downturn, the number of hungry people could double in the northeastern states that are already so heavily afflicted by the conflict,” WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher told a news briefing.

“Our experts are warning it could go as high as 5.5 million people by next month,” she said. “The drop in oil prices and sharp rise in the cost of imported staples has compounded the years of violence that these poor people had to suffer.”

WFP has delivered food to 170,000 people in northeastern Nigeria, but hopes to reach 700,000 by year-end, Luescher said. It is also providing aid to 400,000 people in the three other Lake Chad Basin countries – Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Nigerian Oil Minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said on Thursday that the OPEC country’s crude output had fallen to 1.56 million barrels per day (bpd) as persistent militant attacks have taken out around 700,000 bpd.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said in late July that severely malnourished children are dying in large numbers in northeast Nigeria, the former stronghold of Boko Haram militants where food supplies are close to running out. The aid agency warned of “pockets of what is close to a famine”.

UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said on Friday the situation remains dangerous and volatile, following an attack on an aid convoy last month. “There have been frequent ‘hit and run’ incidents by militants, including suicide bombings, attacks on civilians, torching of homes, and thefts of livestock.”

Armored vehicles and military escorts are urgently needed to provide protection for aid workers, he said.

“We have seen adults so exhausted they are unable to move, and children with swollen faces and hollow eyes and other clear indications of acute malnutrition,” Edwards said.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Boko Haram video claims to show missing Nigerian school girls

A still image from a video posted by Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram on social media,

By Ardo Hazzad

BAUCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigerian militant group Boko Haram has published a video apparently showing recent footage of dozens of school girls kidnapped two years ago, and saying some of them have been killed in air strikes.

Boko Haram seized more than 270 girls from their school in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, in April 2014, part of a seven-year-old insurgency to set up an Islamic state in the north that has killed some 15,000 people and displaced more than two million.

Dozens of the girls managed to flee to safety in the initial melee, but more than 200 are still missing.

In the video published on social media, which was seen by Reuters on Sunday, a masked man stands behind dozens of girls.

“We want to send this message first to the parents of these girls for them to know that these girls are still with us, some of them, and secondly they should tell the Federal Government of Nigeria, to with immediate effect, release our imprisoned brothers,” the man said.

“Some of the girls, about forty of them with God’s permission have been married, some of them have died as a result of bombing by the infidels,” he said.

One veiled girl could be seen holding a baby. Parents have accused Boko Haram of having married off some of the girls against their will.

At the end of the video unidentified bodies could be seen on the ground.

“Military jets have killed some of the girls,” said one of the girls, who was identified by her father, Yakubu Kabu, as his daughter called Dorcas.

“When I heard her voice, I realize she is my daughter,” he told reporters in Abuja. “we are pleading with the government to help…The children are suffering. Some of them could be very sick‎.”

Information Minister Lai Mohammed said in a statement the government “was on top of the situation” to free the girls.

“Since this is not the first time we have been contacted over the issue, we want to be doubly sure that those we are in touch with are who they claim to be,” he said.

Army spokesman Rabe Abubakar was quoted as saying by PR Nigeria, an official government agency, that the military disputed the claims that the air force had hit the girls.

“We are nevertheless studying the video clips to examine if the victims died from other causes rather (than) from the allegation of airstrike,” he said.

Authorities said in May that one of the missing girls had been found and President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to rescue the others.

Boko Haram, which last year pledged loyalty to the militant group Islamic State, has kidnapped hundreds of men, women and children.

Under Buhari’s command and aided by Nigeria’s neighbors, the army has recaptured most territory once lost to Boko Haram, but the group still regularly stages suicide bombings.

Boko Haram has apparently split with Islamic State naming Abu Musab al-Barnawi two weeks ago as the group’s leader for West Africa in a two-page interview in its weekly magazine.

But the previous figurehead Abubakar Shekau appears to have rejected the new role in another video published after Barnawi’s appointment.

(Reporting by Camillus Eboh, Sharon Ogunleye, Ardo Hazzad, Felix Onuah and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Helen Popper and Stephen Powell)

‘Bad Blood’ fears fuel abuse of children of Boko Haram rape

By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

ABUJA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Having been kidnapped by Boko Haram, held for almost a year, and raped by several militants, 28-year-old Aisha Umar could have been forgiven for believing her ordeal was over when she escaped and returned to her hometown in northeast Nigeria last year.

But the mother-of-four was forced to flee her home in the town of Gwoza a fortnight ago when a man threatened to murder her two-year-old boy Mohammed, the son of a Boko Haram fighter.

“He told me that if I didn’t take the child away, he would buy petrol and set the boy on fire until he burned to ashes,” Umar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Madagali, 22 km (14 miles) away, where she now lives with her brother.

The man, who saw Boko Haram kill three of his children, was one of many people in Gwoza who made it clear to Umar that her son was not welcome in the community since their return home.

“People didn’t want to play with the child … they called him Boko Haram child,” Umar said, adding that she received the most abuse from those who had lost relatives to Boko Haram.

Women who are former Boko Haram captives, and their children born out of rape, face mistrust and persecution when they return home, according to a report by peacebuilding group International Alert and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

Many people fear those held by the Islamist militant group have been radicalized and may recruit others when they return home, said the report, which was published earlier this year.

More than 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since 2012, many of whom have been raped, trained to fight, or used as suicide bombers, according to the report.

Joint operations between Nigeria and neighboring countries succeeded in driving Boko Haram from many of its strongholds last year but the Islamists have stepped up cross-border attacks and suicide bombings, many of them carried out by young girls.

“There is a belief that the blood of the father will always run in a child’s veins and therefore that these children will eventually turn on their families and communities,” said Rachel Harvey, chief of child protection for UNICEF in Nigeria.

“BOKO HARAM CHILD”

Umar was kidnapped in August 2014 by Boko Haram militants who shot her husband in the head before taking her into Sambisa Forest, a vast colonial-era game reserve where the militants hide in secluded camps to avoid the Nigerian military.

Umar believes the militant to whom she was married is the father of her two-year-old son. He was named Mohammed Yusuf after Boko Haram’s founder, who died in police custody in 2009.

When she returned home to Gwoza last year and learned that her three children from her murdered husband had been taken in by a neighbor, the family were overjoyed to be reunited.

“But people started telling them that their brother was a Boko Haram child,” she said, adding that the three children became increasingly reluctant to play with Mohammed.

“My oldest daughter told me: ‘Mummy, please, take this child to his father and come back to us’.”

Despite moving to Madagali in Adamawa state, Umar is facing fresh stigma as people become aware of her son’s heritage.

Her relatives do not want to touch Mohammed while people point at her in public and keep their distance, Umar said.

Recalling how she secretly plotted her escape from Sambisa with dozens of other women, Umar talks of how she carefully strapped her toddler to her back as she fled to keep him safe.

Yet the abuse she has suffered since escaping Boko Haram has pushed her to breaking point.

“If I had someone to take this child away from me, I would welcome the idea.”

(Reporting By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Additional Reporting and Writing by Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)