Victims of Nigeria's forced abortions, child killings

STORY: [Aisha] “They gave us injections. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. The injection they gave me, I lost the pregnancy.”

This is Aisha, one of the thousands of women and girls kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

She escaped with her daughter, and was found by Nigerian soldiers, who took them to a nearby camp.

There, she told us, they gave her two injections of an unknown medicine.

An hour later she was writhing in pain and began bleeding heavily from her vagina.

Aisha then understood. The soldiers, she says, tricked her into an abortion.

[Aisha] “They said it was even better it’s aborted, because it’s a Boko Haram child.”

Reuters has uncovered a systematic and secret abortion program by Nigeria’s Army to terminate the pregnancies of women who have been kidnapped and often raped by Islamist militants.

We also found that the Nigerian Army targeted children for killing under the belief they were, or would become, insurgents themselves.

The child killings appear to lack the detailed organization and elaborate infrastructure of the abortion program.

In all, Reuters has tallied at least 10,000 pregnancies that were terminated by the military program since 2013.

[Security force member involved in the abortion program] “It’s done in secret. Unless you go inside the place you wouldn’t know what’s happening in there.”

[Felerin] “They gave me an injection, and when they did that I lost the pregnancy. I was ill, and I was bleeding so much.”

Almost all sources spoke to us at their peril, and on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The stories and words are their own. But to protect their identities, we’ve replaced their voices.

The military though, denies the abortion programme ever existed. And denies troops ever targeted children for killing.

Two decades ago, the Islamist fundamentalist movement, Boko Haram, was born in Nigeria’s northeast.

Boko Haram made worldwide headlines in 2014 when it abducted 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok.

In 2013, the Nigerian Army took over the fight against Boko Haram from a task force of security agencies.

Since then, Boko Haram has splintered and the dominant insurgent faction now brands itself as Islamic State West Africa Province.

Soldiers and local civilians still refer to both groups as Boko Haram though.

Aisha was one of the thousands of women and girls kidnapped by Islamist militants.

[Aisha] “There was no joy to be found with him. Because he was angry, always angry, always beating me, sometimes even hitting me with a whip. I was stubborn, according to him. We were in their hands, what could we do. He beat me so often. Like when he sought me out, I’d get beaten if I said no, or if I lied and told him I had my period. He would say that even with the period he would have his way with me. And he would beat me.”

“In those times, I was praying to God, praying that he would be killed so that I could run away.”

Multiple sources say the Nigerian military’s forced abortion program was in operation since at least 2013.

Central to the program is a notion that the children of Islamist militants are predestined by the blood in their veins to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and one day take up arms against the Nigerian government.

We spoke to 33 women and girls who say they underwent abortions while held by Nigeria’s army.

[Aisha] “They gave me an injection. I felt like I needed to pee so I went outside, towards the stream, away from the building. I squatted down and then blood just started coming out. Turns out it was the pregnancy, but I didn’t know.”

We also reviewed copies of military documents, civilian hospital records and interviewed nine security personnel and five civilian healthcare workers involved in the abortion program.

[Security force member involved in the abortion program] “There are those who are given pills, there are those who, they open their thighs and they put something in there and twist it, like those things butchers use, like scissors, they push it inside and twist it. You’ll see her scream as they’re moving it inside of her, then they tell her to get up, and that’s it.”

We’ve also found that the Nigerian Army didn’t only target women impregnated by insurgents.

They also targeted children in counterinsurgency efforts.

As described by the sources, the killings and the abortions complement one another – aiming not just to wipe out extremists but also to end their perceived bloodline.

Aisha believes, but cannot prove, that the soldiers killed Fatima, her 1-year-old daughter. Fatima was born after Aisha was raped by an Islamist militant while being held captive.

[Aisha] “They gave her an injection. They said it was because she was sick. Then we came home. I was with Fatima, and I noticed her body started heating up. There was this pharmacist, I went there to buy medicine which I gave her to take. We were there, and she just got worse and worse, and then in the evening, I saw she was dead.”

More than 40 sources, both civilians and soldiers, told Reuters they saw the military kill children or saw the dead bodies of children after a military operation.

One massacre of at least 10 children and several adults was near a town called Kukawa.

This soldier says he was there.

[Nigerian Army soldier] “We finished shooting them, and then we dug a hole on the spot. We buried them there, and then we left. If you ask anyone from Kukawa, they will know what happened, not just one or two.”

“This is something that everyone knows. It’s not just our commanders, most other people say the same and they heard it from the mouths of our soldiers, saying that if we let them grow up, if they’re born and they grow up, it will be with that ideology, Boko Haram’s ideology. Because their parents were Boko Haram.”

[Different Nigerian Army soldier] “At times, it doesn’t feel good. And then other times, you see an 8-year-old boy holding a bomb. Or other times, those kids loading ammunition – a 6 or 7-year-old who was taught how to load ammunition into a magazine or a gun. So you see, they start to become ‘bad eggs.’”

[Nigerian Army soldier] “Honestly, it really troubles me. What troubles me is that a small child has no fault. Even in front of the Creator, a child must reach a certain age before his sins start to be counted. So how can you, a human being, who hasn’t caught him doing anything, come and pass judgement on him and kill him?”

Witnesses say the Army carried out operations that targeted children.

When it comes to the abortion program, some aspects remain murky.

Reuters wasn’t able to establish who created the abortion program or who ran it.

What we do know is that the abortion procedures took place in at least five military facilities and five civilian hospitals in the northeast. That’s according to the witnesses and the documents.

Many occurred in the city of Maiduguri, the largest in the area and the command center of the government’s war on the Islamist militants.

Some of the most powerful military leaders in Nigeria oversaw counterinsurgency operations in the region during the period the abortion program was carried out.

It includes the highly decorated Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, formerly the army’s chief of staff. He’s now retired.

Some of his former subordinates have also risen to power, such as the current defense chief Lucky Irabor.

Nigerian military officials say Reuters reporting on the abortion programme is part of a foreign effort to undermine their fight against the insurgents.

Buratai and Irabor didn’t respond to Reuters requests for comment.

But, Irabor told a news conference after our reporting on the abortion program was first published that the cases referred to by Reuters never occurred and that he never saw anything like that.

[Lucky Irabor] “I think Nigerians are better informed as to the disposition of the armed forces, relative to the allusions of Reuters, for them to take a stand and to know that certainly the military and Nigerian armed forces can never be involved in such things.’’

For the other women and girls who survived kidnappings, rapes and abortions, a different kind of misery awaits as they try to restart their lives.

Almost all of them are poor, living in a society ruined by war, strapped for food and medical care.

Aisha is one of them. She feels powerless.

“It made me angry, but well, there was nothing I could do. Because it was in the hands of the law, what power do you have to say anything. It made me angry, but I thought that’s it, whatever God decides for me will be right.”