3
Boko Haram and Weaponizing Misogyny
In times of crisis, young girls are at greater risk of neglect and exploitation. They can be kidnapped, trafficked, recruited into armed groups, forced into early marriage and genital mutilation, and experience violence from their partners in their homes. Conflict intensifies gender inequality and oppression, affecting adolescent girls disproportionately.
—International Rescue Committee website, November 8, 2018
Women’s roles in terrorist groups shift along with the changing needs of the organization; successful groups adapt to hardening security environments. As counterterrorism personnel target men, switching to women operatives (for example, as suicide bombers) offers terrorist organizations a “win–win” strategy. If security forces fail to search women invasively for fear of humiliating them because of social norms about women’s modesty and the honor code, women become the ideal “stealth weapon.”1 If security personnel are too aggressive in searching women at checkpoints, this facilitates terrorist recruitment by providing the propaganda talking point that “our women” are being violated by strange (foreign) men.
In most conflicts, women are an untapped resource. Opening their ranks to women allows terrorist groups to access an additional 51 percent of the population. Although female involvement in insurgencies is not a recent development, as this book argues, women’s presence as propagandists, recruiters, and frontline fighters varies from group to group and in some places, like Nigeria, home of the jihadist terror group Boko Haram, has been on the rise. As of 2022, thousands of Boko Haram fighters had been demobilized and abandoned Boko strongholds in the Sambisa Forest. Of the 145,000 who returned, 35,000 were male fighters; the rest of the returnees were women and children.2
Although the terrorist group (which is often referred to as a “sect” in the literature) first emerged in 2002, in June 2011 Boko Haram began a multipronged campaign of terror that posed a threat to the United States’ national security.3 Boko Haram captured and raped hundreds (if not thousands) of women and girls in “a deliberate strategy to dominate rural residents and … create a new generation of Islamist militants,” a tactic emulated by ISIS in Syria and Iraq.4 Women and girls were awarded to Boko Haram fighters in “marriage,” a euphemism for their gender-based violence, even as the “unions” are cloaked in religious mandates as legitimate.
Boko Haram exploits and coerces women to become operatives. As of 2019, according to scholars Jason Warner and Hilary Matfess, most Boko Haram suicide bombers—some 56 percent—were female, girls as well as women. This majority is especially noteworthy since Boko Haram was a late adopter of suicide terrorism as a tactic, and women weren’t deployed until 2014, more than three years after the men. Despite the lag, women and girls caught up and exceeded men’s participation in attacks. In general, women have been more likely to use suicide vests, while the men were more likely to employ suicide car bombs. The age range is correspondingly horrific: Boko Haram has deployed female bombers as young as seven. By 2019 there had been over sixty attacks in which the bomber was either under fifteen years old or as old as fifty.5 Not only has Boko Haram used more female suicide bombers than any other terrorist organization, but also the women have exacted higher casualties than the men, making them among the most effective suicide bombers in the world. Figure 3.1. illustrates the steep slope of Boko Haram’s suicide attacks by women.
Source: Jason Warner and Hilary Matfess, “Exploding Stereotypes,” Combatting Terrorism Center report, 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep05615.7.pdf.
The first incident involving a female bomber occurred on June 8, 2014, when Boko Haram sent a middle-aged woman on a motorcycle to ride into the 301st Battalion barracks of the Nigerian army in the northeastern city of Gombe.6 Like most of the female bombers discussed in this book, she concealed the explosives under her hijab. The woman detonated the explosive at a checkpoint, killing herself and a soldier.7 Women and young girls between seven and seventeen have targeted civilians at markets, bus depots, fuel stations, churches, and mosques. Almost all the targets in which women were deployed have been civilian “soft targets.” This strategy contrasts with those of some militant groups that will try to limit civilian casualties and exclusively target military bases and police stations, ordinarily understood to be “hard targets.” No other terror organization, including al-Qaeda and ISIS, has killed as many people as Boko Haram: as of 2024, the total number of people killed was around 35,000, with 2 million internally displaced and 23,000 registered as missing with the Red Cross (see figure 3.2).8
Western media showed little interest in Boko Haram prior to 2014. The most well-known case of Boko Haram’s gender-focused strategy occurred in April of that year with the mass abduction of schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state, which prompted the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign. Led by feminist luminaries like Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai, the campaign made front-page news all over the world. The then first lady was quoted as saying: “In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters… . [W]e can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now.”9 Millions could relate.
A year later, in 2015, West African coalition troops liberated around one thousand women from Boko Haram, showing that the number seized by the organization far exceeded the 276 students kidnapped in Chibok, even though that incident continued to receive disproportionate media attention. In the aftermath of the rescue operation, human rights groups discovered that roughly 91 percent of the young women were pregnant. The story of Chibok set the tone for how we understand Boko Haram and its weaponized misogyny. Speaking with the women who joined Boko Haram, however, and hearing their version of events, one gets a different and more complicated view of the terrorist group and how it was perceived over time.
One of the most fascinating details from subsequent reports suggests that in the infamous incident at Chibok, the militants did not attack the school with the intention of kidnapping the girls (or to transform them into human bombs). Rather, they were after supplies and equipment and opportunistically grabbed the girls at the last minute. In the weeks leading up to the abduction, the school had been undergoing construction to repair several buildings in various stages of collapse. Rumor had it that the construction team had left behind on the school grounds a machine used to mold cement blocks and brick. The machine could be repurposed to make rudimentary weapons. This was too attractive a prize for Boko Haram to resist, especially since the school had posted one lone guard that night to protect the compound.10
The Boko Haram raiders originally pretended to be members of the Nigerian state security to minimize any potential opposition. Awakened in their dorm rooms, the girls panicked as uniformed men spread throughout the school grounds yelling, “Get up!”
“They said they were soldiers. They said they were there to protect us,” Grace (not her real name), one of the survivors, recalled later. “They told us all to stay together.”11 When the men could not locate the engine block they had come for, a debate broke out over what to do with the girls. The principal, teachers, and administrators were absent from campus, and the lone elderly guard had run away at first sight of the armed men.12 Once they realized the girls weren’t being guarded, they decided to take them, but not before an argument broke out among the militants. Grace recounted:
One small boy said that they should burn us all and they said, “No let us take them with us to Sambisa.” Another person said, “No let’s not do that. Let’s lead them [back] … to their parents’ homes.” As they were in argument, then one of them said, “No, I can’t come with empty car and go back with empty car… . If we take them to Shekau [Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau], he will know what to do.”13
The men ransacked the kitchen. They grabbed what they could from the pantry, carrying off sacks of rice, corn, and other provisions. As they marauded through the grounds, they repeatedly bellowed, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” (God is great). One group of militants set the school’s administrative offices on fire. At this point the girls realized these were not Nigerian security forces but Boko Haram militants. By now it was too late to run. The girls were herded into trucks at gunpoint.14
The Boko Haram fighters had not brought buses or enough trucks and cars to load up all the girls. Some were piled onto the flatbeds of trucks or forced to march alongside the vehicles. There were so many girls, the militants had a difficult time keeping track. Several escaped by jumping off the truck and running for safety in the neighboring villages. One of them resolved, “I would rather die trying to escape than be killed by these men.”15 Another rationalized her decision to escape: “I’d rather die and my parents will have my coffin” than go with Boko Haram, for her parents might never know that she had disappeared and would have nobody to bury.16
Inside the flatbed of the truck, some girls grabbed onto low-hanging branches to swing their way out of the trucks. Others took their chances and jumped off moving vehicles, sprinting into the dense forest without any idea where they were going. The girls ran in every direction. There were dozens of them. As they ran past the acacia and baobab trees, most were fearful that they might be recaptured at any moment. For unknown reasons, one of the girls inside the truck apprised the kidnappers of what was happening—“Driver, some girls are jumping to escape”—so the driver stopped the vehicle and jumped out. He searched for the runaways with his flashlight but could not recapture any of them. The runaway girls hid for hours, suffering from hunger and thirst. When the driver returned to the vehicle, he threatened the remaining girls that if anyone else ran off, he would shoot them without hesitation. During the drive to the Sambisa Forest, the militants taunted the girls, telling them, “You are the ones with strong heads who insist on attending school when we have said ‘boko’ is ‘haram’ [Western education is forbidden]. We will kill you here today,” and “You should not have been going to school! We are in control of you now.”17
One of the runaways, Aisha (not her real name), made her way to a mango grove and hid for hours. While she hid, she prayed the entire time. That evening the militants found her and loaded her back onto a truck with dozens of other girls they had recaptured. Once they arrived at the forest camp, the girls were kept in a single small tent. Each day Boko Haram fighters would visit to select a wife from among them. In this way, Boko Haram mirrored ISIS in the process of taking a wife without the woman having much say in the matter.
In speaking to therapists and social workers after their release, some of the women disclosed different experiences, including some that were not always negative, at least at the outset. Dauda, for example, claims that she was surrounded by people “who cared about each other like a family” and that she was happy despite being a hostage.18 This is where my conversations with Nigeria’s leading experts on de-radicalization, Fatima Akilu, Hamsatu Allamin, and Maji Peterx, offered vastly different interpretations about women and Boko Haram beyond the stereotypical media narratives.
According to Akilu, not all Nigerian women opposed Boko Haram. In the early days, before the Chibok kidnapping, one of the ways that Boko Haram ingratiated itself with Nigerian women in the Muslim-dominated north was by meticulously implementing Shari’a law about the rights of women and the laws of inheritance. Child marriage is common in Nigeria. Forty-three percent of girls in Nigeria are married before the age of eighteen. “Seventeen percent of underage girls become brides before their fifteenth birthday—many to men near their fathers’ age. The practice is prevalent … with a combined figure of more than 80 percent of teenage girls become child brides.”19 In Borno state in particular, 60 percent of girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were married young, and motherhood at sixteen was a common phenomenon. Young wives have little to no say in most family decisions. Early in the insurgency, women found the Boko Haram sect comparatively appealing because it offered alternatives to the patriarchal power structures endorsed by their conservative families.
Boko Haram’s leaders advocated lowering the dowry or bride price, which meant more young women would be able to choose a husband from among their peers (increasing the likelihood of a love match) rather than facing the likelihood of being compelled to marry a man who was much older but financially secure.20 Also, until Boko Haram took over areas of Nigeria, women in the north were subjected to chronic corruption by the Nigerian establishment and authorities. Akilu explained that when a woman’s father died, she was routinely robbed of her inheritance by her male relatives who worked in cahoots to steal it. This occurred despite women’s supposedly being entitled to inherit a portion of the family wealth and lands. According to Islamic law, daughters inherited half as much as their brothers. But rampant corruption resulted in the men of the family colluding to confiscate the entire inheritance—leaving the women with nothing at all.
Hafsat Muhammed, a local woman whose children were kidnapped by Boko Haram, assured me that for a segment of the female population in northern Nigeria, Boko Haram was not always considered the villain we know it to be now.21 Hamsatu Allamin reiterated this sentiment when she explained that because of the Chibok kidnapping (usually the only thing Westerners know about Nigeria), people assumed that Boko Haram was always anti-women. At the outset, however, Boko Haram portrayed themselves as defenders of women’s rights and guaranteed women’s protections and obligations under Islam. Akilu echoed what Hafsat Muhammed told me: “People often don’t realize how much choice Boko Haram gave women.”22 Furthermore, said Akilu, “life in the forest felt freer and more dignified than living in the dust of an internally displaced persons’ camp [after they were rescued], dependent on international aid groups for a meal a day.”23
The wives of high-ranking commanders and women who joined the group early on had greater freedoms as members of Boko Haram than were afforded women who were not part of the group.24 “[The West dismisses] Boko Haram as anti-women and anti-girls, but they knew that a powerful recruitment strategy was to tell women that, ‘If you join our group, you can have whatever role you want,’ ” Akilu was told. “ ‘Even if you want to be a combatant, we will train you to be a combatant.’ ”25
The women expected abuse and cruel treatment from the militants on the basis of what they had heard and were disarmed when the militants demonstrated even the smallest act of kindness. After the fighters found her hiding, Aisha was driven through a dense tangle of tamarind trees into the forest. She and the other women were taken to a tent and fed dates, called dabino. Villagers alleged that Boko Haram put magical spells on the dabino that they fed the captives in order to bewitch them. They would rather believe a superstition that Boko Haram could enchant the women with witchcraft than accept that the group was able to win over hearts and minds through good treatment.
Some captives were so convinced of the power of Boko Haram’s witchcraft that they avoided eating anything their captors offered them, like modern day Persephone in Hades. Aisha did not believe the dates were enchanted, but Boko Haram’s kindness and gentle nature impressed and surprised her. “That was when I started realizing that they were not as bad as people said they were,” she told Adaobi Nwaubani.26
In contrast, when fourteen-year-old Zara John was kidnapped from Izghe, near Banki, in 2014, she witnessed the militants burning down her village and executing all the men. She and her mother were loaded onto a truck and taken to the Sambisa Forest. “As soon as we arrived, they told us that we were now their slaves,” Zara recalled. She was fed the dabino too, but unlike Aisha, she was convinced that the dates were enchanted and that this explained why her feelings about Boko Haram changed during her captivity: “I was not in my right mind.”27
The difference between the Western narratives about Boko Haram compared to what interviewees told me encompasses a spectrum of behavior from brutal coercion to subtle inducement. Some of the survivors described what we might consider “grooming behaviors,” the very same techniques that pedophiles use. Grooming teenagers usually entails building trust and fostering an emotional dependence to transform the girls into malleable recruits. The New York Times journalist Dionne Searcey described horrific experiences related in interviews by captives who had escaped. Some of the girls “had family members killed before their eyes. Fighters stuck one girl in a room with corpses, and when militants asked about her strength, she presumed they wanted her to clear the bodies. But they wanted her to carry a bomb. Far from willing participants, each girl said that the armed militants had forcibly tied the bombs to them—many times after they had refused to have sex with their captors.”28
Yet some women, Fatima Akilu told me, joined Boko Haram by choice. For example, she had spoken to two young women, Zahra and Amina (not their real names), who joined voluntarily but eventually left because they refused to remarry Boko Haram fighters immediately after their first husbands died as martyrs. The similarity with ISIS is palpable. The women believed that they deserved a mourning period (‘idda) and being reassigned like chattel caused them to become disillusioned.
Stories from some Nigerian interviewees portray Boko Haram as offering women the husband of their choice or letting them leave to challenge the dominant media narrative, which has been shaped by the outcry over the Chibok kidnappings. The narrative contended that women joined Boko Haram only if forced, and analogously, those who had been abducted could be regarded as genuine victims.29
Maji Peterx related the tale of a young couple in Kaduna, in northwestern Nigeria, who had joined Boko Haram together when they could not secure the girl’s parents’ permission to marry. At the time, the boy was too poor to afford a costly dowry. The girl was despondent, knowing she could not marry her true love. So, like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, the two teens ran away together and joined Boko Haram, subverting the usual traditions and practices despite the bride’s family’s objections.30 Inside the militant group, they could be married and camouflage their mobilization as devotion to the group and to each other.
While we associate Boko Haram with horrific gender-based violence, girls like Aisha insist that their Boko Haram captors did not rape them. Aisha swore that “all extramarital sexual relations were strictly prohibited in her camp, and men found guilty were punished by death. The camp’s residents were compelled to watch the executions. ‘They would bury the person in the ground with his head sticking out of the hole, then slit his throat,’ Aisha said. ‘Anyone who was caught not looking while the person was being killed, he too would be punished.’ ”31 Other girls insisted that they were not raped either.32 Instead, the fighters said they were “doing the work of God” and wanted the girls to remain virgins until they were married. When one sixteen-year-old village girl pleaded that she was too young for marriage, a militant retorted, “ ‘Do you think you are better than those Chibok girls that we kidnapped?’ The militant told her the Chibok girls were ‘enjoying their matrimonial homes.’ … He also said the Chibok girls had turned against their parents and were ‘ready to slit their parents’ throats’ if they ever saw them again.”33
An official ban on sexual violence is consistent across Boko Haram–held territory. “You are supposed to protect women,” Aminu Shagari, a Qur’anic scholar and former Boko Haram commander, explained. “You should not allow anyone to harm them.”34
Hafsat Muhammed disclosed something similar in an interview with me. When the militants kidnapped her young son and daughter, she enlisted the help of a former servant from her household who was a member of the group to track the children down. I judiciously raised the subject of the mental and physical state of her daughter after her rescue. “They did not touch her,” Hafsat told me. She immediately understood why I was asking. My relieved reaction to her statement reflected that I knew that ISIS was raping very young Yezidi girls in Iraq—some of whom were the same age as her six-year-old daughter.
Despite some of my interviewees’ claims that Boko Haram treated women with respect, hundreds of women and girls have related the reverse, that they were repeatedly raped in what can only be described as a deliberate strategy to humiliate, dominate, and create a generation of Boko militants. According to a 2015 New York Times account, “In interviews, the women describe being locked inside houses by the dozen, forced to remain ‘at the beck and call of fighters who forced them to have sex.’ ”35
Akilu, who founded Nigerian de-radicalization and reintegration programs such as the Neem Foundation, suggests that the treatment of women varied over time. At the outset of the insurgency, Boko Haram sought to recruit women voluntarily and used more carrots than sticks, appealing to their sense of justice and fair play. She suggested that the status of the women may also have determined the treatment they could expect. The wives of commanders, and women who had joined voluntarily, were extended greater freedoms than were typical for women in the region not affiliated with Boko Haram.36
Boko Haram: Background and Context
In the latter decades of the twentieth century, Nigeria was poised for prosperity as it joined other countries in the global South often referred to as the NICs (newly industrializing countries). Oil was discovered in 1956, four years before Nigerian independence, and as in other countries with abundant natural resources, “black gold” mitigated the sectarian tensions that crosscut north from south, Muslim from Christian, and exacerbated tribal and sectarian schisms. The pernicious legacy of colonialism that drew borders based on imperialist requirements was an underlying source of conflict throughout the global South and the postcolonial world. As foreign colonialists drew borders that suited their own interests, they failed to consider facts on the ground, ethnic alliances, traditional territories, or tribal loyalties. In Nigeria, the north was predominantly Muslim, and the south was largely Christian and/or animist.
Nigeria’s potential for prosperity was negated by successive corrupt and rapacious regimes that looted the oil wealth and embezzled $400 billion during the first fifty years of independence. This endemic corruption within military and civilian governments deepened the sectarian divide and exacerbated the differences between those tribes that benefited from oil and natural resources and those that did not.37 Allocation of wealth was based on patronage and sectarian and religious fault lines.38
Boko Haram was founded in 2002 by a fundamentalist preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, as a sect. Yusuf held many regressive beliefs, including that the world was flat and that scientific evolution was a corrosive Western invention. Most of all, Yusuf was staunchly opposed to Western education. In 2009, following skirmishes in the northeastern city of Maiduguri between his followers and Nigerian security forces, soldiers captured Yusuf and handed him over to the police. After a brief interrogation, the police shot Yusuf. The following year, Yusuf’s five thousand disciples declared war on the Nigerian government, which had failed to account for the hundreds of men and boys rounded up and forcibly disappeared during the insurgency. It was clear that the government had engaged in torture, extrajudicial killing, and targeted assassination.
Since Boko Haram’s founding in Maiduguri in 2002, the Nigerian government has been implicated in grave human rights violations, including unlawful detention, extrajudicial killings, and mass abduction.39 While Mohammed Yusuf was not the first victim of extrajudicial killing by police, he also was not the last. His death in July 2009 led to the selection of a more radical replacement, Abubakar Shekau, to succeed him as leader of the organization.40 One could argue that the police enabled the radicalization of Boko Haram by killing Yusuf and paving the way for Shekau’s ascendance.
In May 2013, eleven years into the insurgency, the Nigerian government imposed a state of emergency in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states. This was a tipping point for Boko Haram, which began targeting women, children, students, and rural communities, in which they used heavy-handed and coercive measures including forced conscription and retaliation.
Shekau warned that his fighters would revolt against the Nigerian security forces, which by this time had arrested and detained several of the insurgents’ wives and children.41 As with other conflicts, when state forces target civilians, terrorist groups cease to consider civilians sacrosanct. We observe an escalation in violence, a justification for targeting the enemy’s civilians, and tit-for-tat attacks.
As with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram’s ultimate goal was to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Muslim-dominated north. The term “Boko Haram” translates in the Hausa language as karatun boko, “Western education” is haram, or “forbidden.” But that is not the name the group uses to refer to itself. Rather, it is the one that the local Nigerian media conferred on it. Members of Boko Haram refer to themselves as Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, or People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.42 Boko Haram bombed public spaces, including the United Nations’ Nigerian offices and the national police headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. In 2011 the government launched an all-out offensive, forcing the militants from Maiduguri into the Sambisa Forest, a former state-controlled wild game reserve. That same year in June, Boko Haram initiated a campaign of suicide bombings against the Nigerian government and eventually against neighboring states.
When terrorist groups shift from “hard” targets to “soft” targets and adopt suicide terrorism as part of their repertoire, the resulting carnage alters the nature of the conflict and circumscribes what types of solutions might be considered. The original ethos of terrorism, if you could consider the deliberate use of violence against civilians to ever have ethical parameters, was to kill a few people but terrorize many others. This norm of projecting fear rather than maximizing carnage changed with the introduction of apocalyptic ideologies whereby violence was intended to hasten or bring about the end of days. As with emerging ideologies such as accelerationism, the point was that this kind of extreme violence did not simply rock the boat; it sank it. Following the trajectory of other terrorist organizations, Boko Haram pivoted from targeting the government and police to attacking civilians in markets, churches, mosques, amusement parks, restaurants, schools, and other places where civilians gathered.43 Amina Yusuf, a teenager who failed in carrying out her suicide mission, recalled:
We were directed by the sect members [Boko Haram] to detonate our explosives anywhere [that] we saw any form of gathering. They said if we press the button, the bomb would explode and we will automatically go to heaven. I was scared, so, I told them that I could not detonate any explosive. [But her sister Zainab said she would do it.] So, they said if Zainab detonated her own, it would serve the purpose.44
Asabe Aliya, a twenty-three-year-old mother who escaped her captors, offered evidence for this shift in targeting civilians and using extreme forms of coercion and abuse. While held captive, she was sexually abused daily. “They turned me into a sex machine,” she told a reporter in 2015. “They took turns to sleep with me. Now, I am pregnant and I cannot identify the father.”45 She was forced to marry one of the fighters despite not knowing which of them had impregnated her.46
Aliya’s story was not unique. Human rights reports assert that most girls who were kidnapped were forced to convert to Boko Haram’s preferred Salafi interpretation of Islam during their captivity, after which they were still raped or gang-raped.47 According to Kashim Shettima, who was governor of Borno state, “The sect leaders made a conscious effort to impregnate the women.” What’s more, in the same fashion as ISIS fighters, “some of them … even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to make the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit their ideology.”48
The aftermath of the women’s rescue demonstrated that gender-based violence might be used to expedite the radicalization process. Indeed, as one Maiduguri social worker opined: “The militants feel it is easier to intimidate and brainwash young girls than adult women. Besides, these girls come cheap, and most of them are extremely loyal.”49 Many of the girls were weaponized—as bombers.50
In honor-bound cultures like rural Nigeria, women who are molested are blamed for bringing shame on their families and violating the “honor code.” In Muslim-majority countries, 57 percent of honor killings are perpetrated for alleged “sexual impropriety,” be it rape, accusations of having an extramarital affair, or being considered “promiscuous.”51 In some instances, engaging in a martyrdom operation may be the only recourse for a woman to restore her lost family honor. As demonstrated in the context of the Caucasus, Iraq, or Palestine, when a dishonored woman becomes a suicide bomber, she goes from being the source of family shame to one of family pride.52
When Boko Haram entered a village, they burned all the houses and took control of the children. Any parent who objected to Boko’s demand was killed on the spot, and hundreds of children, especially the girls, were taken by force. Younger girls were separated from the older ones and taught how to handle weapons or carry out suicide attacks. One villager, Bukkar, told journalist Philip Obaji: “They set our house on fire and walked through the streets kidnapping children who were under 15 years of age and killing those who were above that age. [But] they were most interested in little girls, whom they plan to use as suicide bombers.”53
After 2014, militant jihadist groups were forced to choose sides between ISIS and al Qaeda. While Boko Haram had not formally been an affiliate of al Qaeda, it had close ties with an al Qaeda affiliate in the Maghreb. In the months following March 2015, Shekau pledged allegiance to ISIS’s “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.54 Nevertheless, there were important differences in tactics and strategies within the alliance. For example, Boko Haram deployed girls as young as six or seven on suicide missions. The women in the group had to choose between being a bomber or becoming a wife (which, despite being framed as marriage, was a form of legalized sexual slavery). Although Boko Haram remained a wilayat (province) of the Islamic State’s caliphate, appreciating the similarities and differences between it and ISIS is helpful to understanding the push-and-pull factors of involvement and the role women played in affiliated jihadi organizations.
Women on the Front Lines: Comparing ISIS with Boko Haram
Despite Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance (bay’ah) to ISIS in March 2015, the organizations remained worlds apart regarding women’s involvement. The most significant schism had to do with the role for women and girls. Nigerian women became increasingly involved in Boko Haram’s suicide terror operations after 2014 in advance of the bay’ah. Boko Haram’s strategy did not accord with the way ISIS used women and seemed at odds with its doctrine.
While most of Boko Haram’s suicide bombers were female, there is little evidence that ISIS used women on the front lines. When it comes to the abuse of women, however, there are striking similarities between the two groups, principally in their institutionalizing of gender-based violence and abuse as a means of subordinating adversary populations and as a mechanism to recruit men by making women a commodity. Both groups forcibly captured some women and lured others to join. And for both, impregnating women was a means to produce the next generation of fighters who would share their worldview. For ISIS, it involved making motherhood a requirement; for Boko Haram, this was accomplished forcibly.
According to the survivors of Boko Haram, becoming a suicide bomber was one of the only ways a woman might be able to avoid a forced marriage. The women deduced that if they accepted a martyrdom mission, they might still have a slim chance of escaping, or they could deliberately get caught. After accepting a mission to blow up a congested area, one of the Chibok survivors, Fatima, found help and was able to escape.55
Others, however, were less fortunate.
The bombers would be strapped with an improvised explosive device by a minder and told: “Go where there are lots of people. Then push the button.” It was a “holy war,” and they were “working for Allah.” As the handlers drove the girl to a target, her name was inscribed in a ledger. Back at the camp, the remaining girls were instructed to pray for the bomber: “Pray that you see her again soon in paradise.”56 Sometimes the girl’s explosive vest would be strapped to her midsection by her Boko Haram “husband.” After a brief discussion about meeting again in paradise, the girl would leave the camp like a remote-controlled automaton.57
In 2014, UNICEF reported that Boko Haram used women and girls to carry out three-quarters of the attacks in Nigeria.58 Research by West Point’s Countering Terrorism Center revealed that “from April 11, 2011, to June 30, 2017, Boko Haram deployed 434 bombers to … 238 suicide-bombing attacks. At least 56% of these bombers were women [243], and at least 81 bombers were specifically identified as children or teenagers.”59 One girl blew herself up along with a baby strapped to her back.60
Chadian intelligence conducted interviews with Boko Haram recruiters who admitted how they got girls to perpetrate suicide attacks using deception and trickery. As one Chadian intelligence officer said:
They tell women and girls that they will go to paradise if they commit suicide for Allah. So, they ask girls, “Who wants to go to paradise?” They tell the girls that they will also wear bombs. So the man straps a bomb to his body and [one on] to the girl. They tell the girl, let’s do this and we will meet again in paradise. So the girl goes forward and detonates herself, expecting the man to do the same. But the man does not. He watches her blow herself up into pieces and then goes to the next girl to lure her to do the same thing.61
Saratu Dauda, a Chibok girl who finally escaped in May 2023, explained that for months after being captured all the girls were forced to sleep “rough,” meaning outside, in the Sambisa Forest. They were subjected to a steady stream of Islamic sermons and had to fight to survive because food and water were so limited. When two girls tried to escape, they were publicly whipped so that everyone could see what happened to girls who tried to leave. After capture, the Chibok girls had been given a choice: “Get married or become a slave who could be summoned for housework or sex.”62
Even though some of the women interviewed for this book spoke about their positive experiences, the overwhelming evidence suggests that “marriage” was the Boko Haram euphemism for gender-based violence cloaked in religious justifications. One survivor recounted that her Boko Haram husband “soon began to threaten me with a knife to have sex with him, and when I still refused he brought out his gun, warning that he would kill me if I shouted. Then he began to rape me every night. He was a huge man in his mid-30s and I had never had sex before. It was very painful and I cried bitterly because I was bleeding afterwards.”63
In the camps the girls were subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuse: “forced labour; forced participation in military operations, including carrying ammunition or luring men into ambush; forced marriage to the captors; and sexual abuse, including rape. In addition, they were made to cook, clean and perform other household chores. Others served as porters, carrying the loot stolen by the insurgents from villages and towns they had attacked.”64
Three weeks after the Chibok abductions, Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau released a propaganda video in which he threatened to sell all the Chibok girls as slaves. In the video he boasted that his group “would marry them out at the age of nine or twelve.” He claimed that the girls should never have been in school in the first place since they were old enough to be married.65 West African coalition troops liberated thousands of women from Boko Haram. In the aftermath of the rescues, human rights groups discovered that in one group of 234 freed women, 214 (almost 91 percent) were pregnant.66
ISIS’s gender violence paralleled Boko Haram’s as persecuted ethnic and religious minorities and repressed communities opposed to its ideology became the focus of violence.67 Gender-based violence also attracted new recruits.68
Ariel Ahram of Virginia Tech writes:
Sexual violence helped subordinate and degrade Shi’ites, Alawites, Yezidis, Christians, and other groups [that] ISIS deems enemies, infidels, and apostates. Placed into sexual slavery, captured women and girls become, in effect, breeding stock. Sexual violence reinforced bonds among Sunni Muslims, turning the motley crew of true believers, opportunists, thugs, and outright sociopaths into networks that form the upper levels of the embryonic Islamic State… . ISIS’s own propaganda justifies these acts as permissible conduct toward non-believers who refuse to accede to Islam. Islamic law, they claimed, deemed these women concubines and the rightful spoils of jihad. The bodies of the conquered are, in effect, expropriated as sexual and breeding stock.69
In both groups, women were led to believe that joining the militants would be an adventure, a chance to become a founding sister of an inspired, divinely driven utopia. ISIS propagandists imparted competing messages depending on the audience. One message was directed at Western women, extolling their lives under the caliphate and the benefits of living as a mujahidah, while a different alternative was offered to Arabic speakers. The Arabic-language manifesto published by ISIS’s al-Khansa’a Brigade described a romanticized vision for female ISIS members in which women were relegated to the household.70 Arabic propaganda made it clear that ISIS women lived to serve men. A pamphlet presented detailed instructions on what women might expect; explained that a woman’s role was restricted to childbearing, marriage, cooking, and cleaning; but warned that they might not be able to leave the house. Further, it suggested that by the age of nine, girls were ready to be married, with most “pure girls” married off before the age of seventeen, while they were still young and active (and unsullied).71
Like Boko Haram, behind the thin veneer of propaganda (directed to Arabic, Hausa, or English speakers), ISIS put sustained effort into recruiting women. Once rescued, these same women faced new challenges of reintegration and rehabilitation.
Liberation, Escape, and the Challenge of Reintegration
According to the Nigerian military, thirty thousand women and children were rescued from Boko Haram between 2015 and 2016. Statistics in 2022 exceeded a hundred thousand women and children seeking reintegration. In addition, according to Hamsatu Allamin, as of mid-2022, 145,000 Boko Haram–affiliated fighters had returned. Some were rescued by the Nigerian military, others by neighboring militaries in Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Niger that formed a regional task force. However complex the situation, many women who were captured will never admit to having been fighters, while others appear to have been genuinely radicalized.72 We know that several Nigerian soldiers were wounded in the Sambisa Forest while liberating women who returned fire during the rescue operation. Many kidnapped women and girls suffered from the double trauma of abduction and sexual exploitation, as well as radicalization to convert them to Boko Haram’s ideology. The approach to treatment for their reintegration had to be multilayered and sensitive toward those who suffered complex victimization.
Often the rescued women and girls faced discrimination when they returned to their villages. Some have been burned, lynched, or worse. Others were sent away by their families to Abuja or Lagos to avoid the stigma (and dishonor) they brought upon the family due to rape or pregnancy outside of marriage. The rescued women have been derisively referred to as “Boko wives” and “Sambisa women” or were accused of having “Boko blood” or of carrying “annoba” (epidemics). Survivors’ concerns about being shunned by their communities were compounded by fears that the militants might return and take them back to the forest.73 One rescued woman told the BBC: “You are creating a more dangerous thing than Boko Haram if you grow up not welcomed by society and with nobody wanting to help you. My prayer is for the government to do something. They should come to [the returned captives’] aid and reintegrate them and show them love.”74
Most of the women and girls presented signs of complex post-traumatic stress, but only the Chibok schoolgirls were offered academic fellowships and counseling. Girls kidnapped before or after Chibok received little to no support for their physical and emotional scars or were unaware they were entitled to medical and psychosocial help.75
Conditions in the government-run camps where the freed women were held were abysmal; there was no clean water, and food was scarce. Worse still, many of the rescued women were forced to engage in transactional sex with members of the civilian joint task force (JTF) running the camps to survive. One woman, Ama (not her real name), explained: “They will give you food but in the night they will come back around 5pm or 6pm and they will tell you to come with them… . One man came and brought food to me. The next day he said I should take water from his place [and I went]. He then closed the tent door behind me and raped me. He said, ‘I gave you these things, if you want them, we have to be husband and wife.”76 Ten others in the same camp claimed they’d been coerced into becoming “girlfriends” of security officials to stave off starvation.
In June 2015, Fatima Akilu met with twenty women and girls who underwent trauma counseling after being saved by the Nigerian military from Boko Haram.77 Akilu said that the wives were “pretty tough. They came with a lot of attitude, because they felt that they were a chosen group. They had lived in relative luxury in the forest … and really felt that there was nothing we could offer them.”78
Those women who were rescued by the military and civilian JTF—or because family members agreed to pay their ransom—lacked sufficient support, counseling, and health services when they returned home. Some viewed the women with suspicion as potential fifth columnists who might become activated as militants at some future date. Villagers were leery, and many families refused to take back their victimized daughters. Some people looked at their babies as if they were a different species and shunned them as potential future Boko fighters even though they would have no contact with their fathers. One released captive who was pregnant faced constant hostility: “ ‘If you don’t kill the baby, then you were voluntarily with Boko Haram,’ the Christians in the village said [to her]. ‘As soon as the baby is born, we will kill it,’ a young man with the civilian militia threatened. [The woman’s] father then kept her locked in the house until the child was born.”79 In 2015–16, eight girls escaped from Boko Haram only to be murdered upon returning to their villages—by their husbands, relatives, or neighbors. There was no estimate of how many babies were killed.80
Some of the liberated women made their way back to the Sambisa Forest and to the Boko Haram husbands to whom they had grown attached. Whether these were cases of Stockholm syndrome or genuine re-radicalization remains unclear. Just as some women joined voluntarily, we must consider the possibility that some of the women were hardened by their experiences and preferred being among the sect over repatriation. Reuben Ibeshuwa, a Nigerian psychologist, confirmed that several of the women “voluntarily joined because they believe in [Boko Haram] ideology. If given the chance some would go back.”81
Like other successful de-radicalization programs, Fatima Akilu’s approach was multipronged and included psychosocial treatment mixed with religious reeducation. The radicalized women met with Islamic teachers, who pointed to the sect’s distorted interpretations of the Qur’an. Part of the religious reeducation process involved teaching the women to empathize with the families of Boko Haram victims. According to Ibeshuwa, “In the early days, the women displayed very little empathy for their victims.”82 Fostering empathy was the first step to de-radicalization. One example of this transformation was Dorcas Yakubu, a Chibok girl who had stated in a propaganda video that she didn’t want to be reunited with her family, whom she considered to be infidels. In the video she made this statement while brandishing a knife. Other freed Chibok girls said that Dorcas was so radicalized during her captivity that they feared for their lives in her presence.83
After several months of therapy and religious reeducation, Boko Haram’s distorted religious ideology began to lose its hold on her. Women who had been through the de-radicalization program started to question whether Boko Haram was legitimate, as Dorcas had been taught, and whether everyone who didn’t serve the group really was an infidel.
While people like Fatima Akilu, Hamsatu Allamin, and Maji Peterx have helped many of the rescued women, thousands of other women and girls kidnapped by Boko Haram are still languishing in government-run detention camps. As Akilu explains, the government lacks sufficient resources, and there are not enough therapists and psychologists in the country to help that many victims. One of the more progressive reintegration programs is located at the American University of Nigeria in Yola. The program provides the Chibok girls scholarships, offering them a new lease on life and a fresh start. Even a fresh start, however, is not a clean slate. Because of their experiences, the girls suffer from acute post-traumatic stress. We know from studies that trauma changes the brain in ways that impact an individual’s memory, cognition, and ability to recall or retrieve information. The girls experience flashbacks and night terrors compounded by the fact that they still do not know the whereabouts of hundreds of their friends and family.84
The surviving girls are terrified of being alone, are prone to collapsing in tears, and experience acute survivor’s guilt that they escaped but their friends did not. During therapy, the girls discuss those who are still held captive and anguish over what they imagine their lives must be like. One of the therapists explains: “I tell the girls that what happened has no reflection on them—it just happened at random, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tell them that they should now work hard, and aspire to do well so that these others will be proud, and that we’re sure that they will find them.”85
The kidnapped girls who are Christian are given a second option: a new life in America in Canyonville, Virginia, with the help of a nonprofit group, the Jubilee Campaign. Despite being in America, the girls continue to live in constant fear—for themselves, for their families—because they do not know whether their relatives are dead or alive or whether their villages have been burned to the ground.86
In May 2021, information surfaced which explained the cause for the multilayered trauma from which the rescued women suffered. Many of the women confided in Hamsatu Allamin that the soldiers who had rescued them also raped them. It took over two years for the women to come forward and reveal their terrible secret. Initially, only twenty of the women approached Allamin. Of these women, all twenty had been victimized by the Nigerian military. When Hamsatu investigated further, she found that 85 percent of all the women treated at her de-radicalization program has been sexually brutalized by the military. Many described the attacks in graphic detail and said that the assaults had happened in ditches by the side of the road.87 The women described being passed around from soldier to soldier. The level of detail explained the resulting complex PTSD and even why some liberated women had run back to their Boko husbands.
In December 2022, Reuters released a report detailing additional atrocities perpetrated against the women, who upon their “rescue” were forced to abort their pregnancies. According to the report, between 2013 and November 2021, the Nigerian military conducted a secret systematic abortion program, ending ten thousand pregnancies among women and girls in the northeastern states of Yobe, Borno and Adamawa. The report added, “The soldiers had aborted their pregnancies without asking—or even telling—them.”88
The report was vehemently denied by Nigeria’s government, including the country’s president at the time, Muhammadu Buhari, and a previous president, Goodluck Jonathan, and the reporters were accused of undermining the fight against the Islamist insurgency. Forced abortion (feticide) violates international human rights law established after Nuremberg, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, as well as the Nigerian military’s own code of conduct, which states that under no circumstances should pregnant women be mistreated. Over the course of several months, thirty-three women were interviewed by the Reuters team. Using every possible mechanism to protect the women’s identities and safety, the reporters found that all but one woman had not consented to the termination of their pregnancy. Most had been duped into taking medications, which they were told were for preventing malaria or iron deficiency. The report states:
The campaign relied on deception and physical force against women who were kept in military custody for days or weeks. Three soldiers and a guard said they commonly assured women, who often were debilitated from captivity in the bush, that the pills and injections given to them were to restore their health and fight diseases such as malaria. In some instances, women who resisted were beaten, caned, held at gunpoint or drugged into compliance. Others were tied or pinned down, as abortion drugs were inserted inside them, said a guard and a health worker.89
The lack of bodily autonomy in conjunction with everything else they had suffered exacerbated the women’s complex trauma. The number of victims is staggering. Along the lines of the stigma associated with having been Boko wives, the underlying assumption (as had been the case in Bosnia and other instances of “genetic imperialism” detailed in the next chapter) was that the children were predestined—by the way they had been conceived and the blood in their veins—to pose a future threat to the government and one day take up arms against the Nigerian authorities and society.90
In the words of the Reuters report: “For many women, liberation from captivity hasn’t brought salvation. Even after being freed, they live under a cloud of suspicion, according to soldiers, guards and former captives. They are frequently viewed by the military and their own communities as defiled by their association with militants, the more so if they carry children seen as destined by blood to continue the insurgency.”91
Similarly, within the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab, all the returned women interviewed by the African Institute for Security Studies in 2017 had experienced sexual violence in their camps, just like the Nigerian victims of Boko Haram. They also reported that there were incidents of sexual violence during the government’s counterterrorism operations.92
Terrorism has not declined in Nigeria as it has in other parts of the world. Instead of ISIS’s territorial demise leading to an abatement of terror, violence in Nigeria has escalated. Boko Haram’s targeting of civilians increased by 25 percent, and murder by herdsmen increased by 26 percent, in 2020 compared to 2019. In 2021 a podcast noted: “According to the Nigeria Security Tracker, 2,769 violent deaths were recorded between February 2020 and February 2021 in Borno State alone… . In the north-east, children have been murdered, abducted and used as sex slaves, forcefully recruited as child soldiers, and suffer from diseases and malnutrition at the internally displaced persons camps.”93
In 2020 the International Criminal Court found that grounds existed to investigate possible war crimes and crimes against humanity by both Nigerian security forces and the Boko Haram insurgents. The court has yet to open a probe.94