Amina Ahmed counts herself as one of the lucky ones, or just about. When Boko Haram staged a mass kidnapping in her home town of Gwoza, northern Nigeria, three years ago, she and other female captives were sorted into two different categories of chattel.
The less favoured ones were conscripted as cannon fodder against the Nigerian army, with suicide bombs strapped to their waists. The others became ‘servants to the Emir’s soldiers’ – which, Amina discovered, was Islamist-speak for sex slave. During her two years in captivity, she was forced to sleep with at least 10 different men. She’d shudder whenever she heard their motorbikes roaring into camp.
Eight months ago, she escaped to an IDP (internally displaced person) camp in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri. But there are, she says, drawbacks to still being alive. Now aged 16, she last set foot in a classroom four years ago. And without parents to pay for school – her father is dead and her mother’s whereabouts unknown – her dreams of being a doctor, or even having her own roof over her head, are slipping away.
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