On Tuesday 9 February, two Nigerian girls entered a camp for displaced people in the country’s north-east. Minutes later they detonated their explosive vests, killing 58 people. A third girl refused to take part in the suicide mission for Islamist militant group Boko Haram. This is her story.
Hauwa, not her real name, doesn’t know her age, but she looks 17 or 18.
She had been held by Boko Haram for more than a year when her captors suggested the plan to attack the Dikwa camp.
In return for carrying out their mission, the three girls were told they would go to paradise.
But Hauwa knew that she had to defy them.
‘Spiritual problems’
“I said ‘No’, since my mum is residing in Dikwa, I won’t go and kill people there. I would rather go and stay with my family, even if I die there,” she tells me.
Both her parents and her siblings, except for one brother who had been captured with her, were staying in the camp at Dikwa in Borno state, along with about 50,000 others forced from their homes.
END
Be the first to comment