Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
WRITTEN BY KALAHAN DENG
In February 2016, 16-year-old Zara John , who was freed from Boko Haram was interviewed by the Nigerian military in March 2015. She said how much she relished her life with the Islamist militant commander to whom she was married off while in captivity for about a year, how he had taken care of her and provided all her needs.
“If I had a gun when the Nigerian military came to rescue me, I would have shot at the soldiers,” she said.
There are any number of reasons why a teenager would feel this way about a man who was part of a group that razed her home before abducting her and several other girls, women and children in her community.
It could be Stockholm syndrome, or puppy love, or simply a case of a girl who, for the first time in her life as a young female in the hinterlands of northeast Nigeria, found a life purpose other than cooking and cleaning and babysitting for her family: she was part of a group which planned to take over the world.
Whatever the case, Zara was clearly not the trembling sex-slave that many other rescued girls are reported to have been.
The wait continues
April 14 marks two years since nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram from their school dormitory in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, sparking off the global “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign.
Many Nigerian activists were thrown into a state of panic last month, when a suspected female suicide bomber claimed to be one of the missing Chibok girls after she was arrested in Cameroon. Official investigations eventually revealed that the 12-year-old was not from Chibok but abducted from Bama in northeastern Nigeria by Boko Haram a year ago.
