Nigeria Air force strike boko Haram terrorists

The Nigerian Air Force has recorded another victory in the fight against terrorism as its latest operation decimated some Boko Haram members in Borno.

In a statement shared on its social media page, the air force said it attacked the terrorists at Tagoshe/Mandara Mountain general area about 10km Southwest of Gwoza.

The air force said the operation was successful based on result of the air strike.

Read the statement below:

The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) struck a Boko Haram Terrorist (BHT) location at Tagoshe/Mandara Mountain general area about 10km Southwest of Gwoza in Northern Borno. Intelligence report by Sister surface forces had it that remnants of fleeing BHTs were gathered at the location.

This report was confirmed by NAF Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft before combat platforms were called in to strike the location. Follow-up battle damage assessment confirmed that the air attack was successful as shown by the declassified footage of the operation.

It’s minutes past 4:00 p.m. local time, and Sarah, as we’ll call her, has just returned to her tent in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp at the outskirts Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno state. She had spent much of her day in the heart of town meeting with a woman who’s promising to take her to Italy and find her a job. The young girl, who said she was 17, hasn’t been told where she’ll be working once she arrives at her destination. Yet she isn’t bothered. All she wants is to get to Europe. Sarah is not naïve. She knows that many of the girls who are taken from Nigeria to Italy end up as sex workers. She even suspects that will be the job she’ll be asked to do once she arrives in Europe, given the way her would-be benefactor has been communicating with her. “She always tells me ‘you are a fine girl,’ whenever we are discussing,” she told The Daily Beast at the camp where she has been for about a year now. “She says it wouldn’t be difficult for a girl like me to find a job.” Living a life of abuse is what Sarah has faced since 2015, the year Boko Haram militants invaded her compound in Bama, about 50 miles southeast of this city, and dragged her from her home. She says she was taken to the terrorists’ hideout in the Sambisa Forest where a number of jihadists took turns raping her. Weeks after her abduction, she escaped from her captors in the middle of the night when those guarding the camp had fallen asleep. She walked for long hours before reaching a settlement from which she was able to make her way to Maiduguri. But the difficult life in many IDP camps here, where food is hardly enough for everyone, forced Sarah to turn to prostitution to survive. “I was looking for money to feed myself and to buy medicine as I kept falling ill,” she said. “Men don’t give money without first sleeping with you.” Reports of female IDPs in Maiduguri prostituting for money and food have been on the rise for months. A survey taken last September by NOI Polls, a Nigerian research group, indicated that almost 90 percent of people displaced by Boko Haram in the northeast of the country do not have enough to eat. The survey discovered that many women are trading sex for food and the freedom to move in and out of IDP camps. State officials have been accused of stealing food rations, and also of raping and sexually exploiting women and girls living in the IDP camps in Maiduguri. NOI Polls reported in the survey that 66 percent of 400 displaced people in the northeast said that camp officials sexually abuse the displaced women and girls. Human Rights Watch in a report it released last October, that in July 2016 it documented sexual abuse, including rape and other exploitation of 43 women and girls living in IDP camps in Maiduguri. Sarah is one of the many young girls who say they have suffered sexual abuse by men giving out aid in the camp. The first time she had sex after arriving in Maiduguri was with a member of the city’s vigilante group who sometimes distributed food to displaced persons. “I had to [agree to the man’s advances] because I thought he will stop giving me food if I didn’t.” She said. “He kept putting pressure on me to go to bed with him.” After that first incident, Sarah continued to offer sex to those she thought had the money to pay, moving deep into the heart of Maiduguri to look for clients. It was in one of her outings that she met the woman who is promising to take her to Italy. “She saw me enter a small restaurant to buy food and then came after me,” Sarah said. “She said she had been seeing me in the area for some time and was monitoring me.” While Sarah is excited about traveling to Italy, she is anxious to find out what exact role she’ll be playing once she gets to Europe, and what those helping her achieve expect to gain in return. The teenager is likely to be deceived in the same way thousands of vulnerable girls like her have been tricked in the past.

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/02/boko-haram-sex-slaves-turn-sex-workers-europe/