Kidnapped to kill: Girls into weapons
By King Suleiman CNN
Updated 0001 GMT May 21, 2016
Their name loosely translate to western education is forbidden. They gained global notoriety when they kidnapped more than 200 school girls in April 2014. Their aim is to control large parts of northeast Nigeria and to create an Islamic state. Boko Haram is an Islamic extremist group based in north-eastern Nigeria, also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon. They have killed 20,000 and displaced 2.3 million from their homes and was ranked as the world's deadliest terror group by the Global Terrorism Index in 2015.
Fati, 16, whose name has been changed to secure her identity, had escaped from the bunds of these extremist. She became one of hundreds
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Her future "husband" was carrying a gun, and Fati's parents had already spent a precious 8,000 naira (roughly $40) to smuggle her two older brothers to safety. There was nothing they could do.
She says she has met girls younger than her in Boko Haram's stronghold kidnapped from their homes to be married off, imprisoned and abused by their self-proclaimed "husbands."
"There were so many kidnapped girls there, I couldn't count," Fati says. She also states that many of them had been the Chibok school girls.
Fati's gold bracelets are a gift from her mother, her only connection to home after she was
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Most likely in public, to set an example to the others. "They came to us to pick us," Fati recalls. "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."
Young girls fighting to strap on a bomb, not because they were brainwashed by their captors' violent indoctrination methods but because the relentless hunger and sexual abuse -- coupled with the constant shelling -- became too much to bear.
They wanted a way out, she says. They wanted an escape.
"It was just because they want to run away from Boko Haram," Fati says. "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."
Sambisa, once thought to be Boko Haram's impenetrable, even cursed stronghold, is under attack, the target of relentless aerial bombings and raids by the Nigerian military. "There were always bombs and bullets coming from the sky," Fati recalls. She feared the bombings as much as she feared her captors.
"All of the girls were so frightened. All of them, they always cried and the men raped us," Fati said, remembering her time spent in Sambisa. "There is no food, nothing. The children, you can count their ribs because of the