Every horror imaginable

The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being urged to convert to Islam with machetes pressed to their necks. They did their best to gabble words that sounded like the prayers they were being taught before one fighter noticed a captive with a swollen belly. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she insisted, spreading her hands over her belly in an instinctive reaction that only showed she was lying.

The most senior of the armed men, who looked barely 20 years old, ordered her to lie down on the ground. ‘We don’t bring any Christian babies into the world here,’ he screamed. Then he stripped off the shaking woman’s clothes, slit open her stomach with his machete, ripped out the unborn baby and threw it in a field behind him. ‘All Christian children must die,’ said the killer, as the woman bled into the grass beside him.

This obscene scene is recounted by Patience Ibrahim, captured a few days earlier.