Boko Haram Terrorists Teaching Child Soldiers to Rape

Members of the Muslim terror group Boko Haram are teaching young child soldiers how to rape women and girls at gunpoint, according to one 15-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his home and forced to train with the terrorists.

The Daily Beast has the background:

“The arid town of Gwoza looked like it was finally going to see rainfall after months of drought, but a devastating attack by Boko Haram turned hope to despair. Armed with machetes and guns, the militants roared into the northeast Nigerian town in January 2015. As they jumped from their vehicles, the group began to burn homes and gather the women and children.

“Among the young militants was a 15-year-old boy whom we’ll call Ahmed. Months before, Ahmed was abducted from his home in Baga, not long after completing primary school. I met the teenager in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp at Madinatu, not far away from Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, where I had spent three days meeting with IDPs and listening.

“Ahmed told me he was kidnapped along with two of his neighbors from their compound, and taken to the militants stronghold in Sambisa where he was forced to become a soldier. After just two months training with the jihadists, his recruiters brought him on the mission to Gwoza.

“Well before they set off for the attack, Ahmed’s superiors told the fighters to capture as many women and children as they could, and that they would be allowed to ‘have fun’ when they returned to their base.”

The boy said he didn’t understand what the phrase “have fun” meant. But he said in the leadup to their departure to Gwoza, the terror group leaders showed them.

From the Daily Beast:

“For the next two days, the young boys, most of whom were about Ahmed’s age, watched as their commanders raped women and young girls abducted in earlier raids. The lesson for the boys was clear: They were learning to subdue a struggling victim during sexual assault.

“‘The girls will scream and cry for help, but [the militants] didn’t care,’ Ahmed said. ‘Sometimes they’ll be slapped and threatened with guns if they didn’t cooperate.’

“While in the act, the jihadists provided specific instructions to the young militants.

“‘They tell us to remember to hold the girl tight on both hands, pinned to the floor,’ Ahmed said. ‘They said we shouldn’t let a woman overpower us.’”

Ahmed said he eventually escaped Boko Haram’s grasp, taking as many of the abducted girls with him as he could. And some of their stories haunted him, he added.

The Daily Beast reports:

“At least two girls who escaped from a Boko Haram camp told me they had been raped by ‘little boys’ on separate occasions just before they made their way out of captivity.

“One of them said the militant who raped her was so little she could ‘push him away’ from her ‘very easily.’

“‘He looked like a 13-year-old having sex for the first time,’ said 16-year-old Rukiyat, who was abducted by the militants in Bama and taken to the jihadists stronghold in the Sambissa forest. ‘The only reason he succeeded was because he had a gun.’ …

“‘I was raped almost on a daily basis by different men,’ said Rukiyat, who managed to escape one night when militants who were supposed to be watching the camp had fallen asleep. ‘When they became fed-up with me, they asked the little boy, who has often watched them do it, to take over.’”