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AS a Nigerian human rights commission holds hearings on reports of a mass, army-run forced abortion programme in the country’s war-torn northeast, two more women have told Reuters that they underwent abortions in military custody without their consent.
The accounts of the two women, who said they met by chance at a wedding outside Nigeria, buttress the testimony of more than 30 other women and girls who told Reuters they endured forced abortions during the government’s nearly 14-year war against Islamist insurgents. Their stories also align with accounts of soldiers and health workers involved in the clandestine army scheme. Reuters revealed in December that at least 10,000 pregnancies had been terminated among women and girls impregnated by Islamist insurgents since 2013.
Binta Yau and Rabi Ali, the two women who most recently spoke to Reuters, said they met about a year ago and soon discovered they had a painful experience in common: Both had been captured and impregnated by Islamist insurgents. And both lost their pregnancies after they were taken into custody by Nigerian soldiers and given unidentified pills and injections.
“I began to feel like we were sisters,” said Yau, who, like Ali, said she is about 30. She said she wants their stories to be told. “If the world hears what happened to us, and there is a possibility of human rights or other organisations stopping the bad things that the Nigerian military did to us, maybe it won’t happen again in the future.”
The women’s accounts are strikingly similar to those of the 33 Nigerian women and girls Reuters interviewed in the December report. Many of the abortions were done without the women’s consent or even their knowledge at the time. Some were as young as 12 years old. Some women and girls were tied down, drugged into submission or made to undergo the procedures at gunpoint, Reuters found.
“If the world hears what happened to us, and there is a possibility of human rights or other organizations stopping the bad things that the Nigerian military has done to us, maybe it won’t happen again in the future.”BINTA YAU, WHO SAYS SHE WAS GIVEN AN ABORTION WITHOUT HER CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE
The report also drew on military and hospital documents, as well as interviews with five civilian health workers and nine soldiers and other security officials who participated in the programme. Most of the witnesses spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution from the military. But Yau and Ali, who now live outside Nigeria, agreed to be named, as did two other women in the December story who had left the country.
The accounts of Yau and Ali are coming to light as a panel of the government-appointed National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) investigates a series of stories by Reuters that exposed the abortion programme and a pattern in the military of targeting and killing children, from infants to teens, in combat operations.
Among the rationales cited by soldiers who participated in these operations was the belief that children in the region were related to, or working with, Islamist insurgents. The abortion programme was driven, in part, by a notion within the military that children of insurgents were destined to one day take up arms against the Nigerian government.
Brigadier General Tukur Gusau, a spokesman for defence headquarters, declined to comment and directed all inquiries to the NHRC panel, citing the ongoing investigation. The NHRC did not respond to requests for comment.
Nigerian military leaders previously have adamantly denied the existence of the abortion programme and the deliberate killing of unarmed children.
“Not in Nigeria, not in Nigeria,” said Major General Christopher Musa, then the top commander of the counterinsurgency campaign in northeast Nigeria, in a November interview with Reuters that addressed the abortion programme. “We respect families. We respect women and children. We respect every living soul.”
Asked about the military’s comments on the programme, Yau replied: “This happened to me, and they are denying it. Honestly, I feel like they have some wickedness in their hearts, to be denying what they’ve done to us.”
Ali, who was interviewed separately, responded similarly. “I know the Nigerian military did these things because it happened to me. I am sure that I lost my baby because of the abortion they gave me, and the treatment they gave me. Also to my friend Binta.”
Yau said her abortion was done about three years ago at Giwa Barracks, a detention centre in Maiduguri, the largest city in Nigeria’s northeast and the command centre of the government’s war on Islamist extremists. Three other women were forced to have abortions in the same room with her, Yau said.
Yau’s account is consistent with those of other women and health workers who told Reuters abortions were done in groups, from a handful to 50 or 60 at a time. Four of the almost three dozen women interviewed by Reuters said their abortions took place at Giwa Barracks.
The conflict zone
The abortion programme has taken place in the northeastern states of Yobe, Borno and Adamawa, where the Nigerian military has been fighting Islamist insurgents for nearly 14 years. The satellite image shows the location of sites in Maiduguri where abortions were performed.
The details of Yau’s abortion were corroborated by another woman who told Reuters that she was among those in the room with Yau at Giwa Barracks. She said army doctors gave Yau multiple injections.
Ali said her abortion occurred about five years ago, when she was about three months pregnant, in a Maiduguri hospital whose name she could not recall. She said she had been in too much pain to notice whether other women around her also had the procedures.
Initially, the military rejected calls to investigate the Reuters abortion and child killing reports. But amid a growing international outcry, including from U.S. and United Nations officials, Chief of Defence Staff Lucky Irabor relented later in December and agreed to cooperate with an inquiry by the NHRC.
The NHRC, described on its website as an “extra-judicial mechanism for the respect and enjoyment of human rights,” has a 16-member governing council nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The commission appointed a separate panel to look into the Reuters findings and make recommendations. The seven-member panel launched its inquiry in February; the timing of its determinations is unknown.
Earlier this year, eight people familiar with the history of the commission, including rights lawyers and researchers, told Reuters that they were unaware of any major cases in which the commission’s findings had led to the prosecution of senior Nigerian officials. That lack of accountability was underscored in past U.N. and U.S. State Department reports. The commission has, however, secured financial restitution for some victims of abuse.
Although the NHRC panel’s hearings on the Reuters findings are closed to the public, the commission has released summaries of testimony on Twitter and on its website. Military leaders and government officials are quoted in the posts as denying they participated in any abortion programme or that any such programme exists.
On March 29, the commission posted on Twitter a statement referencing the Reuters reports under a headline saying that three ex-members of the militant group Boko Haram had “exonerate(d) soldiers.” That post drew criticism from some human rights advocates and an international expert on Nigeria, who noted the commission may be commenting prematurely on the proceedings or using witnesses who were not in a position to know of the events in question first-hand.
“I am a bit surprised that the panel is putting out comments on the go, as the investigation still takes place,” Vincent Foucher, a Nigeria expert who is a research fellow with the French National Science Research Centre, told Reuters. “It might have been more appropriate to wait to have gone through enough witnesses before putting out a barrage of statements that all clear the military.”
Yau said that she had not heard of the NHRC investigation, but that she would be willing to testify “at any time.”
Other women and girls who spoke to Reuters before the December series ran said they were traumatised and fearful of coming forward. Some said they had been threatened with beatings or death if they disclosed what happened to them. Abortion is against the law in Nigeria, for women and providers, except to save the life of the mother. In addition, the topic is taboo in many circles in the culturally conservative country. Some women kept their experiences secret even from family members.
Many women and girls who underwent abortions, as well as soldiers who participated in the programme, still live in parts of the northeast that are strictly controlled by the military. Humanitarian organisations that operate in the region regularly complain of restricted access to civilians in need.
‘I didn’t trust them’
Ali was at a wedding outside Nigeria last year and said she approached Yau after realising she too was from Nigeria because of the way she spoke Hausa, a regional language.
The women, both from Borno state, swapped stories and spoke of their shared trauma: Both had been abducted by Islamist militants, forced to marry and fall pregnant while in captivity, according to their accounts, which they gave in separate interviews. The militants have kidnapped thousands of women and children over the course of the war, often forcing the women to become insurgent fighters’ “wives,” and sometimes using them or kidnapped children as suicide bombers.
Yau said she was about 25 when she was kidnapped and forced to marry a fighter named Abubakar. Ali said she had been happily married for 10 years and was raising two children when militants seized her about three years ago from her village and took her alone to Tumbun Gini, a town close to the borders with Chad and Niger.
There at the camp, Ali said, Islamist fighters gathered the women and told them that their husbands had been killed and they must remarry. She was forced to marry a fighter named Mustapha.
Both women escaped on foot during gun battles between the insurgents and Nigeria’s military, only to be taken into custody by Nigerian soldiers.
Both women said they were loaded into army vehicles and taken to places where they were given pills and injections.
The vast majority of the 33 women interviewed by Reuters for the series published in December said their procedures were done through medication. Hospital records reviewed by Reuters indicate surgical abortions were also performed. Many of the women also said they were given blood and urine tests before the abortions.
Before arriving at Giwa Barracks, Yau, who had known she was pregnant before she escaped, said she was given a health check inside a base in the town of Bama, 70 kilometres southeast of Maiduguri. The check included blood and a urine test. She said she was with at least 10 other women. Some were visibly pregnant, she said. Others were not showing but told her they were pregnant.
The next day, the military drove them to Giwa. After she was put into a room with three other pregnant women, Yau said, army personnel gave her pills and more injections. Soon after, she said, she began to bleed heavily.
She asked the soldiers what was happening, and she said they told her she was suffering from the stress of her escape.
“I didn’t believe them,” said Yau. “I didn’t trust them.”
A soldier later told her she should be glad she lost the pregnancy because a child born from an insurgent father would have been a burden to her and her family.
“You have to be happy,” she recalled the soldier saying. “Be glad that you come clean, that you lost your unborn baby, because of the status of your family. You won’t experience any challenges within your family and within your community.”
Ali said she began feeling stomach pains during her escape from the insurgents. When she arrived at an army base in Monguno, about 130 km southwest of Maiduguri, she began bleeding “just a little bit.” She was given blood and urine tests. Then, she said, she was given pills and injections in her buttocks, which she said the soldiers told her was for her stomach pain.
Her bleeding continued and got a little bit heavier, she said. After two days, the soldiers brought her and a group of about 20 women to a military barracks in Maiduguri. Ali was taken to a hospital in town and given more medicine to swallow. Within an hour, she began to experience heavy bleeding and what she described as the worst stomach pain she had ever felt.
“I felt like I was dying,” she said.
The doctors told her that she was losing her pregnancy, perhaps because of the fear and anxiety she experienced while escaping the insurgents. Like Yau, she said she didn’t believe the explanation.
“I think they gave me an abortion,” she said. “It was deliberate.”
After she was released, Ali said, she received a visitor: her husband. He hadn’t been killed by the insurgents. But he wanted nothing to do with her, she said. He remarried and has refused to let her see her children.
“Maybe he thinks I inherited Boko Haram attitudes or something,” she said.
Reuters was unable to reach Ali’s former husband.
Both Yau and Ali reject the notion that women and children so easily absorb the beliefs of Islamist insurgents.
“If the baby had lived, I would have liked the baby, because it’s my blood, my daughter or my son,” Yau said. “I feel bad, and I feel like I hate the military because even though I got the baby unwillingly, it’s my blood.”
How Reuters tallied the toll of Nigeria’s forced abortion programme
Reuters revealed in December that at least 10,000 abortions had been performed at military and civilian facilities under the auspices of the Nigerian Army since at least 2013. The abortion programme was aimed at women and girls who were kidnapped and impregnated by Islamist insurgents during their long war against the government in the country’s northeast. The figure is based on more than 50 interviews with soldiers, guards and health workers involved in the programme, women who underwent abortions and other civilian witnesses, as well as an examination of hospital registers and other documents.
Reuters took a conservative approach to tallying abortions, and the actual number of abortions in the northeast over the decade could be significantly higher. Some of the figures may overlap, as indicated below. Sources and some locations are not named to protect the identity of the witnesses.
Thirty-five women and girls told Reuters they underwent abortions while in the custody of the Nigerian Army after escaping or being liberated from insurgent captivity.
Many described being transported by truck to abortion sites in groups of dozens of other women, some visibly pregnant and others with less advanced pregnancies that were later confirmed by urine or blood tests. Eighteen said they had abortions in groups, ranging from a handful of people to 50 or 60 at a time, suggesting that each person’s experience represents a sliver of a larger total. Four other people said they witnessed abortions but did not have them.
Civilian hospital registers record 155 separate abortions.
The documents include copies of registers and excerpts copied from them. The documents were reviewed by Reuters and authenticated by health workers and/or women whose abortions are recorded on the registers. The documents include the names of the women, their ages, dates of admission, the number of weeks pregnant and the drugs/surgery administered to them. The records are not complete accountings of abortions at the facilities, but snapshots in time. They describe abortions performed between 2017 and 2020 at two civilian hospitals in the city of Maiduguri and three other civilian hospitals outside of Borno State. The names of at least eight of the 35 women interviewed by Reuters appear on the hospital registers. Reuters interviewed five civilian health workers who participated in or witnessed the abortions.
The minimum number of abortions performed at a single army base outside Maiduguri between 2016 and 2020 was 3,900.
One soldier said he was involved in 3,900 abortions there during that time, based on programme records he reviewed for Reuters. Another soldier, whose tenure at the base overlapped with the first, said he witnessed thousands more abortions during that period – recalling an average of around five per day.
In addition, documents reviewed by Reuters show that 5,200 abortions were performed at the same base between 2017 and 2019. The figures are noted on sheets of paper that bear the military base’s letterhead and contain the signatures of two officers. The tallies were prepared for Nigerian Army headquarters in Abuja, in part to procure funding, according to the two soldiers. Both soldiers said the total of 5,200 did not include women who died. Reuters could not locate the officers named on the documents or confirm the authenticity of their signatures. As a result, we used the lowest number estimated by the soldiers – 3,900.
The minimum number of abortions performed in the Maiduguri area between 2013 and 2021 was 7,000.
In separate interviews, three soldiers and one guard each provided estimates of the number of women and girls they transported to military facilities for abortions in the area. Their figures ranged from 7,000 to 8,600. The soldiers said they were ordered to keep careful track of the pregnant women. The figures provided by the four sources may overlap, as some sources may have been involved in some of the same transports. “We count them one after another and then write it on a paper to send to commanders,” one soldier said of the accounting method.
A set of detailed, contemporaneous notes was provided by a fifth source, a guard. From March 19, 2013, to February 24, 2019, he and a colleague recorded a total of 15,197 women or girls transported to the Maiduguri area for abortions. Reuters was unable to determine if this tally overlapped with others cited in its December story about the abortion programme.
In total, Reuters interviewed nine security personnel, including soldiers and other government employees such as guards, for the story.
