Traumatically Harrowing

"The girl looked tired, malnourished and psychologically tortured and could not give us more details about her stay in the forest and how her other mates were treated."
Idrissou Yaoubou, leader, self-defence group, Limani, Cameroon

This file photo taken from video released by Nigeria's Boko Haram terrorist network, Monday May 12, 2014, shows missing girls abducted from the northeastern town of Chibok.  (AP Photo)

A fifteen-year-old girl who informed authorities she was one of the Nigerian girls who had been abducted by Boko Haram marauders two years ago, had surrendered herself on Saturday in Cameroon rather than carry out a suicide bombing mission she had been tasked with. Her experience and her description served to confirm what experts had long suspected, that Boko Haram had instructed some of the girls they were to become suicide bombers.

These girls have been so demoralized, terror-stricken, their humanity degraded and their sex violated by their captors in their grim situation as slaves to barbarian masters that it would hardly be surprising that they would have little free will left to them. There can be little doubt that some of these girls would be only too willing to end their lives and escape the squalid misery and hopelessness that has been enforced upon them.

Although the authenticity of the girl's statements is undergoing a check, according to Midjiyawa Bakari, Far North region governor, a community leader in Chibok remarked that the girl's age would correspond with that of the youngest among the 765 girls abducted in 2014 from a government boarding school. With the 15-year-old there were two other young women with explosive belts one of whom was arrested, the other fleeing back into Nigeria.

The kind of torment that these young girls have been living with for the past two years can only be imagined. Abducted, herded into the large Nigerian forest to live among the Boko Haram terrorists where they were forced to become Muslims and where the leader of the jihadist group threatened to sell them off or to marry them to his fighters, there is little doubt that all of that did take place, the girls pawns in the life of Islamist jihadists.