Boko Haram News 2015: A Year After Mass Kidnapping, Many Girls Still Held Captive in Nigeria

At least 2,000 women and girls in Nigeria have been abducted by Boko Haram since January 2014, with many forced to serve as sexual slaves or combatants, Amnesty International reported on Tuesday, the first anniversary of the kidnapping of 270 schoolgirls.

The mass abduction of the girls from Chibok village in northeastern Nigeria on April 14 last year shocked Nigerians and triggered international outrage. One year on, majority of the girls are still held captive by the Islamist militants.

Abduction is among war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Boko Haram militant group as documented by researchers of Amnesty International who interviewed almost 200 people, including 28 women and girls, who escaped from captivity.

Thousands have been killed by Boko Haram fighters in their six-year bid to create an Islamist caliphate in northeastern Nigeria.

"Men and women, boys and girls, Christians and Muslims, have been killed, abducted and brutalized by Boko Haram during a reign of terror which has affected millions," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary general.

"Recent military successes might spell the beginning of the end for Boko Haram, but there is a huge amount to be done to protect civilians, resolve the humanitarian crisis and begin the healing process," he said.

Nineteen-year-old Aisha was taken while attending a friend's wedding in September, along with her sister, the bride, and the bride's sister. She was not only repeatedly gang-raped but was also trained in combat and forced to participate in an attack against her home village. She witnessed how Boko Haram killed her sister and about 50 other people.

"Some of them refused to convert, some refused to learn how to kill others," she told Amnesty researchers.

Amnesty also obtained reports of widespread abuses of people in areas controlled by Boko Haram.

Hundreds of men and boys have been forced to join the ranks of the militant group since 2014, Amnesty said. Their numbers increased when public support for Boko Haram waned after its push for the creation of an Islamist state in northern Nigeria became increasingly violent, following the death of its leader Mohammed Yusuf in police custody in 2009.

Many of those who refused to join have been killed. According to two young men, at least 100 were killed in a single day in December when Boko Haram took over Madagali town, near the border with Cameroon. They only got to live to tell the tale because the killers' knives became too blunt to slit more throats.

Children were also forced to stone people accused of adultery to death, a 15-year-old boy from Bama town in Borno state recounted.

"These appalling executions, the sexual violence, the recruitment of child soldiers, these are war crimes and crimes against humanity and they need to be investigated (by the Nigerian authorities)," Daniel Eyre, author of the report, said in an interview.

"It's clear that the extent of destruction by Boko Haram and the toll it has taken on the civilian population is huge, so the kind of investment that's needed to rehabilitate communities is enormous," he said.

Over 3.5 million people in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad are facing months of food shortages as a result of the insurgency, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. About 800,000 children have become refugees, the United Nations children's fund said.

Government forces of Nigeria, Chad, and Niger have driven out the Boko Haram in some towns following their simultaneous offensives over the past few weeks.