This investigation is based on interviews with 33 women and girls who say they underwent abortions while in the custody of the Nigerian Army. Just one said she freely gave consent. The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant, and some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed. The abortions mostly were carried out without the person’s consent – and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witness accounts. Since at least 2013, the Nigerian Army has run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the country’s northeast, terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters. She recalled the injections, then understood: The soldiers had aborted their pregnancies without asking – or even telling – them.Īfter the women washed the blood down a squat toilet, she said, they were warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.” And she was warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.” Fati, early 20s Soon after, she says, soldiers medically aborted the pregnancy without telling her. “The soldiers want to kill us,” she thought.įati was four months pregnant when liberated from the insurgents. The other women were bleeding as well, and writhing on the floor. Uniformed men came in and out, giving her and five other women mysterious injections and pills.Īfter about four hours, said Fati, who was about four months pregnant, she felt searing pain in her stomach and black blood seeped out of her. It was rank, with cockroaches skittering across the floor. “I was extremely grateful to the soldiers,” she said.Ībout a week later, Fati said, she lay on a mat in a narrow, dim room at a military barracks in Maiduguri, the state capital. Over more than a year, she told Reuters, she had been forcibly married to insurgents, beaten and repeatedly raped – resulting in a recent pregnancy. When she awoke in a military camp nearby, “I felt the happiest I ever had in my life,” said Fati, now in her early 20s, recalling the attack that occurred several years ago in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state. As her captors fled, Fati blacked out in terror. Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Lake Chad island village where Islamist insurgents held her and many other women captive.
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