Bintu Ibrahim, a woman who underwent one such forced abortion, told Reuters: “If they had left me with the baby, I would have wanted it.”
Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), an organization that monitors religious persecution globally, released a report in November noting a “sharp increase in genocidal violence from militant non-state actors, including jihadists,” in Africa. According to ACN, the situation is particularly dire in Nigeria, which “teeters on the brink of becoming a failed state” due to rising jihadism.
ACN’s November report stated that in Nigeria the “number of attacks and killings has sharply risen, with more than 7,600 Christians killed” between 2020 and 2022. Though previous reports detailed Islamic extremists’ use of rape as a terror tactic, Reuters’ article sheds light on the massive scale of the jihadists’ rape campaign. Now, with Reuters’ findings, there is concrete evidence that Nigeria’s radical Islamic insurgents have been perpetuating a systematic campaign of torture and rape on women, with at the very least more than 10,000 victims since 2013.
One woman, identified by Reuters as Fati, was kidnapped, regularly beaten and raped, and forcibly married off to three successive Islamist extremists. According to victims’ and Nigerian soldiers’ testimonies obtained by Reuters, Fati’s horrific experience is the norm for women captured by Boko Haram and ISWAP.
Reuters details how after enduring repeated torture and rape at the hands of the jihadist militants for years, Fati was rescued by the Nigerian military only to undergo a forced chemical abortion in which she experienced “searing pain,” surrounded by other women who were similarly suffering through abortions.
For the second consecutive year, Nigeria has been left off of the U.S. State Department’s list of countries that engage in or tolerate the world’s worst religious freedom violations, despite regular reports of kidnappings and killings of Christians.
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