Face to Face With Boko Haram: A Christian Boy Tells His Story After Escape

Photo Credit: BreitbartBy Emmanuel Ogebe. Henry must have touched a cord of compassion amongst the bloodthirsty killers. Upon his abduction, they initially assumed his injured leg was a war injury. Being a soldier meant immediate beheading. Christians usually were given a chance to convert before being killed. Not soldiers – Christian or Muslim.

They seemed to believe his denials that he was a soldier. When they asked him later if he had anyone they could call to ransom him, he said he had no one and had just come out of a 14-month hospitalization. The terrorists offered to help him when they learnt he lost his dad at age 2. He was crippled so he couldn’t be much help as a fighter…

Many months later, after the abduction of the Chibok girls [276 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped en masse], they said to him, “if you need anything, tell us – even if you want a wife, you can marry one of the girls we captured.” Henry is one of only a couple of people I know who has inside perspective about the girls’ abduction apart from the girls themselves. . .

On another day, Henry buried his head and wept silently as the terrorists described how they had completely destroyed a town – his hometown. It was a completely Christian hilltop enclave that had survived numerous attacks. He wondered what had happened to his aged mum. He must not let the terrorists know it was his hometown lest they finish him off, too.

After 9 months, Henry fled. (Read more about the story after escape HERE)

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Woman’s Story of Captivity in ISIS

By Eli Lake. This week I visited an encampment north of Mosul, Iraq, where a cleric introduced me to Najat Owdi Rashul, an Iraqi Yazidi woman whose family was released last week after six months of Islamic State detention. She described the conditions for her fellow Yazidi women who were held in a make-shift prison at a banquet hall in Mosul.

Of all the horrors of daily life in the custody of the jihadists, Najat recalled, the worst came in the early evenings. That’s when a commander would call out the names of a few captive women and girls, saying the list was approved by special order of the governor of Mosul, or the caliph himself.

“They would scream when their name was called,” she said. “Sometimes they would begin to pull their hair out and beat their face” to make themselves appear uglier. She said they knew they would be taken away, and would never be seen again . . .

Najat said she was not abused. But she told me that she was terrified that her name would be called. While her account obviously cannot be verified, it comports with these other survivors’ stories and reports from the press and human-rights groups.

The experience for her family and their entire village was searing. The family’s patriarch, a stout Yazidi named Murad Khallaf Ali, said that he was lucky because he was too old to be pressed into service. But many of the younger, more able men were forced to tend the sheep the Islamic State troops had stolen from Yazidi villages, or to place homemade bombs on the sides of roads. (Read more from this story HERE)

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