Kidnapped Boko Haram Girl Narrates Ordeal At The Hands Of Captors

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To the casual observer, she seems like any other teenager blossoming into womanhood but as she recalls the horrors she’s seen, pain flits across her eyes. Speaking exclusively to Daily Express through an interpreter, 15-year-old Victoria Youhana, who is not an asylum seeker but in the UK to share her experience spoke of her terror as she fled through blood-filled streets as terrorists waged a massacre in her town.

“The noise, the smell, the sound of gunshots and the sights of men you have always seen around your town being killed in front of you is something you never get over. We were terrified – everyone knows about Boko Haram, even little children of five. We knew they kidnapped women, turned them into slaves and forced them to marry the fighters while Christians were shot or beheaded if they refused to convert to Islam. We had to get away quickly.”

She rounded up her mother and younger brothers aged ten, seven, five, three and two, left everything behind and fled from their homes, running for their lives. The Nigerian soldiers who had been entrusted with the protection of the area had either been killed or deserted the battlefront after facing a massive onslaught from the extremists who were armed with grenades, machine guns and rocket propelled grenades.

With corpses littered all over the place in a massacre which saw up to 2,000 people murdered, Victoria and her family made their getaway but were apprehended by the extremists who marched them at gunpoint towards a group of other dispirited prisoners – mostly women and children – forcing them on a long trek to the Lawanti area of the town of Kukawa near Lake Chad. According to her, Victoria said they were herded like cattle into a compound and did not know if they would be raped or killed.

She said: “We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. The men who refused to become Boko Haram fighters were shot and killed. After a few days, the children were all rounded up for Islamic teaching and me and the other teenage girls were told we would be married to Boko Haram fighters. We knew they were impregnated or infected with disease. We were so scared we couldn’t sleep. We’d nod off before jerking awake, back into this nightmare. Sometimes we were fed scraps of food and sometimes we got nothing at all. Terrified and hungry, that’s what it was like. It was a prison camp.”

After 13 days – and being well aware of what had happened to the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014 where the Christian girls were forced to become Boko Haram or became jihadist wives in an outrage which sparked condemnation from across the world – Victoria’s mother determined that her children were not going to endure the fate of the Chibok girls and quietly hatched a plan to escape. During the night, while the terrorists were on another marauding mission, they crept out of the camp.

Victoria said: “We were terrified of being discovered and just kept going, walking through the dark forest, trying to be quiet, all the while afraid we’d be caught and killed.”

For seven hours, they trudged on until they were spotted by soldiers, and their initial terror turned to tears of joy when they realised they were government troops who transported them to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. The traumatised family were taken into the custody of the Catholic Diocese of Maiduguri, where they were fed, clothed and housed under the kind genorousity of the Bishop, the Most Reverend Oliver Dashe. Victoria and her siblings were also provided with trauma counselling to help them come to terms with what had happened.

A devout Christian, Victoria said it was her faith that helped her throughout the ordeal.

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She said: “We prayed to God daily and he helped us escape. I am now moving on with my life now and looking forward to getting back to school.”

Victoria has been brought to the UK by the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need as part of its Persecuted and Forgotten project which aims to highlight the suffering of people persecuted for their religion.

John Pontifex, spokesman for the charity, said: “Victoria’s family are determined that as many people as possible hear about the crimes being committed by Boko Haram.”

Father Gideon Obasogie, communications director for the Diocese of Maiduguri, who has accompanied Victoria on her short trip to the UK, said: “Boko Haram has become an enemy of humanity, willing to kill anything from humans – both Christians and Muslims – to small animals drinking water. The world needs to wake up to the threat of extremists. They are against life.”