Aisha was only five years old when Boko Haram militants stormed her village with machetes and butchered her father and brother in front of her.
They had refused to join the rebel group in northern Nigeria’s war-ravaged state of Borno. And so, one of Aisha’s earliest memories, is watching them being murdered as punishment.
But, she says, her ordeal “had only just begun”.
She was then abducted and pushed into child labour until being forcibly married off at the age of 13. She says she spent the next four years being repeatedly raped by multiple militants, falling pregnant and giving birth shortly before managing to escape a few months ago, aged 17.
“I don’t know who the father of my child is,” she says, her voice stumbling to a halt, as her daughter plays, unaware, behind her.
“At one point I felt like killing myself because of what was happening. I felt it would be better to be dead than alive and forced to experience all this.”
Beside her is Hawwa, also 17. She too was abducted aged five by Boko Haram, forced into child marriage, and repeatedly raped over many years. She contracted HIV during her decade-long ordeal and was only rescued a few months ago by Nigerian soldiers who stormed the Boko Haram camp where she was being held.
“In captivity we wished we were dead. The pain from physical beatings was better than the other assaults,” she says, adding that following her release she has had to contend with the double stigma of being a former Boko Haram captive living with HIV.
“People would run away from me in the streets. I was depressed and always sick,” she says, bowing her head.
These stories are harrowing and yet disturbingly common in Nigeria, a country that has been waging a 12 year war with Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden”.
Since the first explosion of violence in 2014, the insurgent group has made children, schools and education a central target. It first dominated international headlines when it abducted more than 300 largely Christian girls from a school in Chibok, also in Borno state. At least 90 are still believed to be in captivity or remain unaccounted for.
Boko Haram has since evolved and multiple armed factions have splintered away from it, including Islamic State affiliates, which Donald Trump announced that the US government bombed for the second time last month.
In this security vacuum, gangs have flourished and also expanded into abducting children, a move officials believe is fuelled by the lucrative illegal adoption market as well as organ harvesting.
ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, says over the last decade alone there have been at least 16 mass abductions of students from schools and hostels carried out by criminal and militant Islamist groups across northern Nigeria. The UN also warned this year that, despite efforts to combat the crisis, Nigeria is witnessing a renewed surge in the abduction of school children.
A former Boko Haram commander, who oversaw at least 1,500 fighters and eventually fled the group before serving time in prison, explains that attacking schools was the “doctrine”.
Speaking anonymously from an undisclosed location deep in Borno state, the heartland of the group, he admits burning a school during a night raid he oversaw in 2015. This action triggered his own decision to leave.
“We were always attacking school and churches whenever we came across them. It was the doctrine,” he says, grimly.
“Whenever they come across a school they will just burn it down. I felt so remorseful about it,” he adds.
The Independent travelled across northern Nigeria, meeting nearly a dozen parents and their children who were survivors of Boko Haram and criminal abductions. In some cases in Adamawa state, children who had been kidnapped en route to school have never returned.
Those who were eventually found struggled with extreme post-traumatic stress disorder, stigma from society and with no schooling – no future.
Coupled with rising poverty and the destruction of school infrastructure in the fighting, parents are now too afraid or unable to send their children to learn.
All of this means that around 18 million children are estimated to be out of school in Nigeria, the highest number of children not in formal education anywhere in the world.
The figure is so vast that one in five of all children on this planet who are out of school are in Nigeria.
“It’s a multidimensional crisis,” explains Jummai Lawan Musa, Nigeria country director for Street Child, which runs temporary learning centres to help child survivors get back into formal education. The organisation also supports girls like Aisha and Hawwa to recover, reintegrate into society and learn skills like sewing to rebuild their lives.
But she says this and other similar programmes are in jeopardy after unprecedented aid cuts, with Trump effectively dismantling USAID last year and Sir Keir Starmer announcing Britain would redirect foreign aid spending towards defence. Street Child as a global organisation has lost over £1 million in US funding alone.
