ABUJA (Reuters) - In the gloom of a hilltop cave in
Nigeria where she was held captive, Hajja had a
knife pressed to her throat by a man who gave her a
choice - convert to Islam or die.
Two gunmen from Boko Haram had seized the
Christian teenager in July as she picked corn near
her village in the Gwoza hills, a remote part of
northeastern Nigeria where a six-month-old
government offensive is struggling to contain an
insurgency by the al Qaeda-linked Islamist group.
In a new development, Boko Haram is abducting
Christian women whom it converts to Islam on pain of
death and then forces into "marriage" with fighters -
a tactic that recalls Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance
Army in the jungles of Uganda.
The three months Hajja spent as the slave of a 14-
strong guerrilla unit, cooking and cleaning for them
before she escaped, give a rare glimpse into how the
Islamists have changed tack in the face of Nigerian
military pressure.
"I can't sleep when I think of being there," the 19-
year-old told Reuters, recounting forced mountain
marches, rebel intelligence gathering - and watching
her captors slit the throats of prisoners Hajja had
helped lure into a trap.
Nigerian security officials say the Islamists have
pulled back after army assaults since May on their
bases on the semi-desert plain and are now sheltering
in the Mandara mountains, along the Cameroon
border around the city of Gwoza. From the hills they
have been launching increasingly deadly attacks.
The rugged mountain terrain - as fellow al Qaeda
allies found in Afghanistan - has proven an
advantageous base for a movement that once styled
itself the "Nigerian Taliban" and sees all non-Muslims
as infidels who must convert or be killed.
The United States designated Boko Haram a terrorist
group on Wednesday. Western governments are
increasingly concerned about the wider threat posed
by the group, which wants to create an Islamic state
in a religiously mixed country of 170 million and
which has ties with al Qaeda's north African wing.
Hajja's account of how Boko Haram has adapted and
survived in recent months underlines the difficulties
governments in the region face. The spread of the
threat was underscored by the kidnap on Thursday of
a French priest in Cameroon, an attack France
believes may have involved Boko Haram.
The following day, Nigerian troops raided a base for
the group in the Gwoza hills. The army said it killed
29 Boko Haram fighters and was "closing in" on the
rebels.
FORCED TO CONVERT
The group, whose name broadly translates as
"Western education is sinful", has killed thousands
during a four-year insurgency against the Nigerian
state, targeting the police and armed forces as well
as politicians and then turning on Christians in the
predominantly Muslim north of the country.
The military offensive launched in mid-May, and the
fact that large numbers of civilian vigilantes have
supported it, has triggered a fierce backlash against
local people by Boko Haram. The militants have killed
hundreds in the past few weeks, including in
massacres of school children.
The Islamists dragged Hajja along rocky mountain
paths and slept in caves in the hills, a landscape
unfamiliar to most Nigerian soldiers, recruited from
the plains.
She ceremonially converted to Islam, cooked for the
men, carried ammunition during an attack on a police
outpost and was about to be married to one of the
insurgents before she managed to engineer a
dramatic escape. She says she was not raped.
"If I cried, they beat me. If I spoke, they beat me.
They told me I must become a Muslim but I refused
again and again," Hajja told Reuters in an interview.
Her family name is withheld to protect relatives still
living in the Gwoza area.
"They were about to slaughter me and one of them
begged me not to resist and just before I had my
throat slit I relented. They put a veil on me and made
me read from the Koran," she said in the Nigerian
capital, Abuja, where she is now living.
At least a dozen teenagers like her remain in
captivity, Michael Yohanna, a councilor in Gwoza's
local government told Reuters. Some have married
commanders, recalling Kony's LRA, which abducted
thousands of "wives" in a 20-year war in Uganda
before a truce in 1986. Kony remains a fugitive.
A man called Ibrahim Tada Nglayike led the group
Hajja was with. On one mission, Hajja was sent to
stand in a field near a village to attract the attention
of civilians working with the army. When five men
approached her, they were ambushed.
"They took them back to a cave and tied them up.
They cut their throats, one at a time," Hajja said. "I
thought my heart would burst out of my chest,
because I was the bait."
Among those who did the killing was the Muslim wife
of the leader Nglayike, the only other woman in the
band of fighters.
Reuters verified Hajja's account of having been
abducted with independent figures in the region.
Boko Haram shuns the media and none of its
members could be contacted for comment.
Hajja says the long-bearded insurgents lived a basic
lifestyle, eating corn, millet and occasionally meat
from animals they stole and which she slaughtered.
The group, armed with AK-47 rifles and pistols stolen
from police they killed, moved every day around the
hills to avoid being tracked by the army and slept in
the caves to shelter from the cold and for protection
against air assaults.
"They didn't use phones but they had a radio," Hajja
said.
"They would listen to BBC Hausa or Voice of America
and jump and shout if they heard about Boko Haram
attacks."
"TOOTHPASTE EFFECT"
Forced out of cities and semi-desert bases since
Jonathan declared a state of emergency in May, the
militants have mostly retreated to hills and forests on
the Cameroon border.
"It's the toothpaste effect: squeeze one end and it
comes out the other. They have proven resilient and
are adapting faster than the military," a Nigerian
security source said.
Army commanders denied Boko Haram had any
control over the Gwoza mountains: "We are curtailing
their activities and I can assure you that ... the
insurgency will soon be a thing of the past,"
Lieutenant Colonel Adamu Garba Laka said.
But a Nigerian general asked Cameroon this month
for help in fighting Boko Haram, and the backlash
against civilians has made the conflict deadlier than
ever.
According to one security source, in the five months
after Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the
northeast there were 1,708 deaths in 83 violent
clashes, compared with 667 deaths from 117
incidents in the previous five months.
Pushing the conflict into poor rural regions, like
Gwoza, where Hajja was seized, runs the risk of
radicalizing more disenchanted youths and drawing
more people into the violence.
"Gwoza has disintegrated. We have no schools, no
hospitals, no government offices functioning," said
councilor Yohanna.
"I worry that youths will take the law into their own
hands. It will become a war between Christians and
Muslims."
Insurgents moved freely through the hills and even
into the town of Gwoza, Hajja said. Fighters made
trips to collect cash, ammunition and weapons from
the Sambisa Game Reserve, a forested region where
Boko Haram has established camps.
Informants, mostly farmers, would warn them of
approaching army patrols, Hajja said, adding that the
rebels also appeared to have sympathetic contacts
among the troops - something Nigerian military
commanders deny.
"They know the area very well and many people help
them because they are afraid or support their cause,"
Hajja said.
On once occasion, Boko Haram commanders were
able travel from Maiduguri, the state capital on the
plain north of Gwoza, to meet the guerrilla group in
the hills.
Hajja said her unit carried out dozens of attacks,
killing police and anyone suspected of aiding
authorities.
The longer the insurgency goes on, President
Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian, will come
under increasing criticism from his northern
opponents as elections in early 2015 draw closer.
He risks growing resentment from a northern
population who believe he is out of touch with their
troubles.
It is also becoming a drain on Africa's second largest
economy - Nigeria allocates a fifth of its budget for
security.
Hajja eventually escaped by feigning severe stomach
pains. Thinking her too ill to flee, the insurgents sent
her to hospital escorted only by an older woman.
Once she was among other people, Hajja threatened
to denounce the group to police, prompting the
woman to abandon her and flee.
"I finally tore off the veil and I cried," Hajja said.
"So many times I thought I'd die."
(Additional reporting by Isaac Abrak in Abuja and
Ibrahim Mshelizza and Lanre Ola in Maiduguri;
Editing by Tim Cocks and Alastair Macdonald)
mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AG04120131117?irpc=932

Atigbo

I dont still understand, so hw is islam a religion that preaches peace?

what can i say

we blacks are fools. How can a white man or an outsider bring his own religion to us and we completely abide by it like fools. He tells u 2 kil, and u do it foolishly, forgeting u are kiling your fellow black man
and those are thesame f*cking white people that calls us monkeys. God forbid

I still maintain that "one Nigeria" is a hoax.
The Hausa Muslim is "not" my brother!!!
He cannot be!
We are different!
The only way to end Boko Haram is to use the northern elite against them. Split the elites and let them use the tool they have created to kill themselves!!!

This is absolutely pathetic! Those cannibals(BH) are not even worth the waste of bullet. They deserve to be burn by nuke fluke.

lildray: we blacks are fools. How can a white man or an outsider bring his own religion to us and we completely abide by it like fools. He tells u 2 kil, and u do it foolishly, forgeting u are kiling your fellow black man
and those are thesame f*cking white people that calls us monkeys. God forbid

shut up jare! We've heard this 'national anthem' for long, it sound stale.

The best thing u will claim u are an atheist, atheism is ur forefather's religion?

And maybe u will say u are a traditionalist cos dts wot ur forefathers did! Is that ur own religion? Can't u choose urs? Dnt u av a mind of urs?

You are not diff from the same boko harams who say western religion is a sin and yet, they are not using arrows ans swords, they are using the internet and radios!

U are blaming the black man by following the white man's religion and yet u are not wearing leaves and u are maybe using a gas cooker and all other things!

What i will tell u is ds:

As much as religion is causing most of these, u can only be dumb to do the wrong!
Nobody can force u against ur wish, there's an option to suffer and die for ur cause. And as much as i can tell u, u will undstnd that it is most who lack education, or those who are dumb as animals that are easily brainwashed!

Is it not the same white men that stopped u from using humans as sacrifices in ur primitive days?

Bros, park well jur and talk abt u being a fool and not the black race as u foolishly asserted!