In an astounding revelation, child soldiers fleeing Nigeria’s militant Islamist group Boko Haram have said that the jihadist group was teaching children as young as 13 how to rape their hostages.
A Daily Mail report cited a boy soldier who fled from the Nigerian jihadists who said that adult fighters ask minor recruits that they will “have fun” sexually exploiting their hostages.
The terror group, who has pledged allegiance to ISIS, is reportedly turning to recruitment of child soldiers to boost their ranks after having sustained terrible losses last year in battles against the Nigerian military.
According to the report, a 15-year-old boy Ahmed, abducted by Boko Haram in Baga, described how senior fighters spent two days instructing children how to rape their hostages and not to allow women to ‘overpower’ them.
“The girls will scream and cry for help, but [the militants] didn’t care. Sometimes they’ll be slapped and threatened with guns if they didn't cooperate,” Ahmed was quoted by Daily Mail as saying.
He added that young fighters were told they would ‘have fun’ on completion of a successful mission.
On the other hand, a girl who escaped the clutches of Boko Haram, told the Daily Beast how she had been raped by ‘little boys’ who were so little that she could easily fend them off very easily.
“One looked like a 13-year-old having sex for the first time, but succeeded because he had a gun,” she said.
The report further claimed that Boko Haram militants, fleeing an attack on their base last week, may have used some of the girls kidnapped in 2014 from Nigerials Chibok as human shields to prevent being fired upon by fighter jets.
Boko Haram militants had kidnapped more than 200 girls from their school dormitories in the town of Chibok in April 2014. It is also reported that the group has kidnapped hundreds of men, women and children during its seven-year insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.
Boko Haram has killed 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million during its insurgency. It controlled an area the size of Belgium in early 2015 but has been pushed back by troops from Nigeria and neighbouring countries since then.
