In August, a horrifying report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that 10,000 young boys have been kidnapped by Boko Haram over the past three years. The children were being trained up to be jihadists and “used as fighters, suicide bombers and spies.”
It was also reported by the WSJ that “Commanders of al Qaeda’s branches in Yemen, Somalia and Mali have deployed youngsters. Islamic State has used children in combat, suicide bombings and in execution videos in Iraq and Syria.”
It should come as no surprise that Boko Haram is teaching these child soldiers to rape, as rape and sex slavery have historically been practiced as religious acts of Islamic war and conquest.
The shocking sexual assaults by Muslim migrants throughout Europe are manifestations of the same norm. The West, after all, is considered dar al Harb.
“Boko Haram Teaching Child Soldiers to Rape”, by Philip Obaji Jr., Daily Beast, December 27, 2016:
Senior Boko Haram militants are now ‘providing specific instructions’ to younger boys for raping women and girls at gunpoint.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—The arid town of Gwoza looked like it was finally going to see rainfall after months of drought, but a devastating attack by Boko Haram turned hope to despair. Armed with machetes and guns, the militants roared into the northeast Nigerian town in January 2015. As they jumped from their vehicles, the group began to burn homes and gather the women and children.
Among the young militants was a 15-year-old boy whom we’ll call Ahmed. Months before, Ahmed was abducted from his home in Baga, not long after completing primary school. I met the teenager in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp at Madinatu, not far away from Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, where I had spent three days meeting with IDPs and listening.
Ahmed told me he was kidnapped along with two of his neighbors from their compound, and taken to the militants stronghold in Sambisa where he was forced to become a soldier. After just two months training with the jihadists, his recruiters brought him on the mission to Gwoza.
Well before they set off for the attack, Ahmed’s superiors told the fighters to capture as many women and children as they could, and that they would be allowed to “have fun” when they returned to their base.
“At first I didn’t understand what they meant by ‘you are going to have fun’ and nobody thought to explain,” said Ahmed. “Days before we left for Gwoza, they began to show us what they wanted us to do.”
For the next two days, the young boys, most of whom were about Ahmed’s age, watched as their commanders raped women and young girls abducted in earlier raids. The lesson for the boys was clear: They were learning to subdue a struggling victim during sexual assault.
“The girls will scream and cry for help, but [the militants] didn’t care,” Ahmed said. “Sometimes they’ll be slapped and threatened with guns if they didn’t cooperate.”
While in the act, the jihadists provided specific instructions to the young militants.
“They tell us to remember to hold the girl tight on both hands, pinned to the floor,” Ahmed said. “They said we shouldn’t let a woman overpower us.”…
At least two girls who escaped from a Boko Haram camp told me they had been raped by “little boys” on separate occasions just before they made their way out of captivity.
One of them said the militant who raped her was so little she could “push him away” from her “very easily.”
“He looked like a 13-year-old having sex for the first time,” said 16-year-old Rukiyat, who was abducted by the militants in Bama and taken to the jihadists stronghold in the Sambissa forest. “The only reason he succeeded was because he had a gun.”
Since Boko Haram began its uprising in 2009, the jihadists have focused much of their attention on abducting women and girls, the most notable of which was the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from their dormitory in Chibok, an incident that gained global attention. A number of victims became sex slaves of the militants.
“I was raped almost on a daily basis by different men,” said Rukiyat, who managed to escape one night when militants who were supposed to be watching the camp had fallen asleep. “When they became fed-up with me, they asked the little boy, who has often watched them do it, to take over.”
In the last 18 months, images of the women and girls emerging from Boko Haram captivity, where some were forced to marry members of the group, have been very constant. But despite their freedom from terror and brutality, many victims still face assault and rape in IDP camps—even from young boys.
A report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released in October detailed how women and girls who survived Boko Haram violence were raped by officials at camps in northern Nigeria where they sought refuge….