ICC Note: Hauwa is a Muslim Nigerian girl who joined the Boko Haram ranks in search for answers and help to stem the spiritual attacks she had been facing, but found herself at the edge of her possible death. On February 9, Hauwa was one of three teenage girls Boko Haram sent on a mission to Dikwa displacement camp near Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria to blow themselves up in the name of Allah. Hauwa was the only girl who survived that mission, instead ditching because she refused to kill innocent people and just wanted to return to her family. Hauwa’s story is unfortunately all-to-common in northern Nigeria where girls her age live under constant threat of abduction and then conscription as suicide bombers. More than 200 of the mostly Christian teenage girls from Chibok remain missing whom Boko Haram kidnapped in April 2014 and many fear that Boko Haram has also used them for this murderous purpose.
By Ann Soy
3/23/16 Nigeria (BBC) – On Tuesday 9 February, two Nigerian girls entered a camp for displaced people in the country’s north-east. Minutes later they detonated their explosive vests, killing 58 people. A third girl refused to take part in the suicide mission for Islamist militant group Boko Haram. This is her story.
Hauwa, not her real name, doesn’t know her age, but she looks 17 or 18.
She had been held by Boko Haram for more than a year when her captors suggested the plan to attack the Dikwa camp.
In return for carrying out their mission, the three girls were told they would go to paradise.
But Hauwa knew that she had to defy them.
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