woman believed to have seen them has said.
The 24 schoolgirls, who she said she was held with for three days last
November, were physically well, she said, and were being coerced to
cook for their captors, who numbered in their thousands. The girls
were reportedly very tearful and homesick but had not been harmed.
"They were very emotional," said Monica Sunday, a 20-year-old
Christian woman who had been kidnapped by the jihadist group after her
village, Kiva, in the far north east of Nigeria, had been twice
attacked and then burned to the ground.
She spoke to Jonathan Miller of Channel 4 news, a United Kingdom
broadcasting organisation, in a dusty informal camp for displaced
people near the capital, Abuja, where she had recently arrived.
"None of the girls really talked very much," she said. "They just
cried and prayed and lamented for their parents. I comforted them and
told them to have faith in God and that He would open a way for them
so that their nightmare would be over."
Monica, who was herself deeply traumatised by her own experience and
lost her small baby, Abraham John, as she fled through the bush while
making her escape, said the Chibok girls had remained true to their
Christian faith. They wore simple head-coverings - not full hijabs -
she said, but none was practising Islam.
Split up and dispersed
The Boko Haram insurgents have a brutal reputation for raping the
women they abduct, but Monica insisted that the Chibok girls had not
been sexually abused and that none of them was pregnant.
"The girls I was with were all in their mid-teens, some a bit younger,
some older," she said. "None of them was sick." She did not know where
any of the other girls, among the 219 still missing, were held. She
also said that none had been forced into marriage. Monica knew about
the kidnap of the Chibok girls before she herself was abducted.
"They divided them up. Some were taken to Gwoza [a town near Nigeria's
border with Cameroon, near to where Monica herself had been abducted].
Not all of them are held in one place."
This is in line with earlier reports that the girls had been split up
into smaller groups and dispersed across the region.
Monica says that the "room" in which she was held with the Chibok
girls was a shanty-style lean-to, its roof just polythene sheeting.
After three days, she says she was moved to another part of the camp
where she was held with more than 40 other women from across northern
Nigeria, who, like her, had all been kidnapped.
"Among them was one particular woman who they beat until she was
bleeding all over her body because she refused to convert to Islam,"
she said. "She eventually succumbed," she said, her head bowed. Monica
said she had refused repeated attempts to force her to convert.
"They were really angry with me and shouted and screamed at me and
called me 'arney'" - an abusive term for "infidel" in the Hausa
language. But she said that she had not been physically hurt by her
captors. Her experience at their hands in the Sambisa camp, having
been marched for two months through the bush, has left Monica
shattered. "Every time I hear their name," she said, "I shake with
fear."
She said that the Boko Haram commander in the Sambisa camp was called
Ibrahim Shekau, who she described as "assistant" to Abubakar Shekau,
the apparently deranged leader of the group. It is not known whether
the two are related.
Impenetrable terrain
The camp, she said, was huge, and sprawled through almost impenetrably
thick forest terrain. She said there were at least 1,000 women held
captive there and thousands of rebel soldiers. "Most of the soldiers
are out in the bush all the time, hunting others," as she put it. They
had guns and uniforms and many military vehicles, and there were
access roads.
Monica added that these roads allowed Boko Haram to bring tankers,
carrying drinking water, into the camp. She said there was enough
food, mostly looted from nearby villages by the rebels. "They even
have grinding machines," she said. "We had rice and we had corn. No
meat, but sometimes there was fish."
Read more at TheNation:
http://thenationonlineng.net/new/met-24-chibok-schoolgirls/
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