MAIDUGURI, Nigeria -- In the decadelong war with Boko Haram that has coursed through northeast Nigeria and spread to three neighboring countries, more than 500 women have been deployed as suicide bombers or apprehended before they carried out their deadly missions -- a number that terrorism experts said exceeds any other conflict in history.
Some have bravely resisted, foiling the extremists' plans in quiet and often unheralded ways.
But most women who broke away from Boko Haram keep their abductions secret, knowing they would be stigmatized as terrorist sympathizers even though they were held against their wills and defied the militants. They walk the streets of Maiduguri, Nigeria, in the shadow of billboards celebrating the heroism of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot for standing up to the Taliban.
The women are often forgotten, not unlike the more than 100 schoolgirls kidnapped from the village of Chibok who remain missing -- nearly six years after their abduction caused such global alarm.
Dozens of women interviewed by The New York Times have said that Boko Haram gave them a terrible choice: "marry" the group's fighters or be deployed as bombers. Captives have said some women chose instead to blow up only themselves.
But some survived and want to tell their stories. One is Balaraba Mohammed, then a 19-year-old who had been blindfolded and kidnapped by Boko Haram.
Mohammed said she arrived at the Boko Haram camp in a daze in 2012. Boko Haram had murdered her husband in front of her after he criticized the group. Days later they came back for Mohammed, throwing her baby to the ground and abducting her. She thought her daughter was dead.
New female captives would arrive every time fighters left the camp. Some of them were raped and forced to take birth control pills, she said. Some of them were used to test suicide vests.
When fighters gave her a bomb, she knew she would have to go or be shot, too.
Which is how she found herself with five others at the edge of a well.
The women had been dispatched for the grimmest of missions: Go blow up a mosque and everyone inside.
The women wanted to get rid of their bombs without killing anyone, including themselves. Mohammed came up with a plan: They removed their headscarves and tied them into a long rope. Mohammed attached the bombs and gingerly lowered them into the well, praying it was filled with water.
"We ran for our lives," Mohammed said.
The bombs didn't detonate, and the young women, scared and unsure what to do, ran back to the Boko Haram camp, Mohammed said. They swore on a Quran to their captors they had accomplished their mission and that they ran so fast to escape that they lost their hijabs on the way.
Cheers went up, and the fighters convened a feast to celebrate the women they thought had become killers.
They then prepared Mohammed and other women for a major operation: to blow up the Monday Market, the biggest in northeast Nigeria.
They loaded some 20 cars, motorbikes and stolen military trucks with bombers and fighters and drove to the market. Mohammed said she was sick and too weak to even get out of the car. She sat inside as bombs exploded, and the vehicle sped away.
Mohammed was driven back to the camp and remained ill for several days, locked in a tin shack with other captives as they listened to fighters preparing for vigilante forces to invade the camp.
She heard gunshots and a loud noise. She lost consciousness.
Hadiza Musa, who had joined the local vigilante force to avenge the Boko Haram capture of her sister, arrived to find a horrific scene: The entire camp was on fire, and there was carnage everywhere.
Musa said she sifted through the dead and came across Mohammed, who was unconscious. Musa cried as she helped ferry Mohammed to a hospital.
Musa stayed by Mohammed, caring for her until she was conscious. She tracked down her grandmother and told Mohammed the first good news she had heard in months: Her baby, Hairat, was alive.
Musa and Mohammed now consider themselves sisters. In Maiduguri, where she lives with Hairat, who is now in first grade, some neighbors who know she was abducted are suspicious and think she might be loyal to Boko Haram.
"The best thing is for you to be killed," a neighbor told Mohammed.
She said she just tries to ignore those kinds of comments.
A Section on 03/15/2020