Boko Haram Is Leaving A Trail Of Devastation

The horrific path of destruction left by terrorists in Nigeria has taken a heavy human toll. According to a report by The New York Times on Monday, Boko Haram militants raped hundreds of female captives as they made their way across rural regions of the West African country, sometimes with the goal of impregnating them. Nigerian officials claimed that it was potentially part of the group's goal of creating a new wave of Islamist terrorists.

The report stated that the militants had locked up groups of women in homes before dragging them out and assaulting them. One woman told the Times that the men had forced her to marry one of them.

"They chose the ones they wanted to marry," said 25-year-old Hamsatu in the Times report, indicating that she was four months pregnant with her captor's child. She said they threatened to kill the ones who screamed.

The paper reported that many of the women had fled to a refugee camp in Maiduguri to wait out the continuous fighting. So far, out of the nearly 25,000 camp inhabitants, around 200 have been found to be pregnant. Local Borno State officials believe that there are more carrying the unwanted children of Boko Haram militants that simply have not come forward yet.

Borno Governor Kashim Shettima told the publication that the group was planning to use the women to further their Islamist rule.

"The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women," said Shettima. "Some of them, I was told, even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to make the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit their ideology."

It's the latest aggressive step by Boko Haram to enslave Nigerian women in their cause, following a mass kidnapping of nearly 300 Chibok schoolgirls in April 2014. The students had been assembled for a science exam when the militants grabbed them. The school was later closed out of fear that Boko Haram might attack again in retaliation for what they perceived as dangerous Western educational indoctrination.

"This crime has rightly caused outrage both in Nigeria and across the world," said President-elect Muhammadu Buhari in a statement on the one-year anniversary of the kidnapping.

According to the Times report, many of the sexual assault victims had been raped so many times they had been psychologically affected. Some had begun denying that the militants had touched them, despite camp entry-interviews conducted upon their arrival that indicated otherwise.

On Tuesday, Buhari responded to an attack on the Maiduguri camp last week which prompted a city-wide lockdown last Thursday, calling the inability of military officials to stamp out the group "shameful."

"The military has never been so incapacitated like now," said Buhari in a statement, indicating that stopping the rise of Boko Haram throughout the country's Northeast corridor would be one of his administration's central objectives. "It's a shame that the military cannot secure 14 Nigeria's local governments out of the 774 local governments in the country."

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