metro

Nigerian military secretly aborts 10,000 pregnancies of women raped by terrorists

Published

3 years ago

December 8, 2022

The Nigerian military has aborted over 10,000 pregnancies secretly of women and girls reportedly raped by Boko Haram terrorists in the North-East.

According to a report by Reuters, many of the women and girls had been kidnapped and raped by the terrorists.

Fati, who was kidnapped by terrorists and later rescued by the military, narrated her ordeal.

She lost contact with her family one night during an attack by insurgents on Monguno.

She was later captured by the terrorists, whipped and shunted into one of two pickup trucks with the other women, she said.

They drove through the night to the shores of the vast Lake Chad, where fighters loaded the women into canoes. As the sun rose, the captives were ferried out toward the lake’s myriad islands.

Fati said she was married off three times, forced to take a new husband whenever the previous one didn’t return from the war. The third, who impregnated her, “was the worst out of all of them,” she said. “He would hit me with the butt of his gun … He would beat me until I was sick.”

Fati was four months pregnant when liberated from the insurgents. Soon after, she says, soldiers medically aborted the pregnancy without telling her. And she was warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.” Photo Credit: REUTERS/Paul Carsten

When the Nigerian soldiers came that day about three years ago, she welcomed them.

Now in her 20s, Fati said shortly after being rescued with four months of pregnancy, uniformed men gave her and five other women mysterious injections and pills in a dim room at a military barracks in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital.

READ ALSO:

After about four hours, Fati, who said she was about four months pregnant, felt a searing pain in her stomach and black blood seeped out of her. The other women were bleeding as well, and writhing on the floor. “The soldiers want to kill us,” she thought.

According to her, the soldiers aborted the pregnancies without telling them. And she was warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.”

The abortions mostly were carried out without the person’s consent – and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witness accounts. The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant, and some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed.

This investigation is based on interviews with 33 women and girls who say they underwent abortions while in the custody of the Nigerian Army. Just one said she freely gave consent. Reporters also interviewed five civilian healthcare workers and nine security personnel involved in the programme, including soldiers and other government employees such as armed guards engaged in escorting pregnant women to abortion sites. In addition, Reuters reviewed copies of military documents and civilian hospital records describing or tallying thousands of abortion procedures.

Three soldiers and a guard said they commonly assured women, who often were debilitated from captivity in the bush, that the pills and injections given to them were to restore their health and fight diseases such as malaria. In some instances, women who resisted were beaten, caned, held at gunpoint or drugged into compliance. Others were tied or pinned down, as abortion drugs were inserted inside them, said a guard and a health worker.

Bintu Ibrahim, now in her late 20s, recounted how soldiers gave her two injections without her consent after picking her up with a group of other women who fled the insurgents about three years ago. When the blood came, and the terrifying pain, she knew she and the others had undergone abortions. The women protested and demanded to know why, she said, until the soldiers threatened to kill them.

“If they had left me with the baby, I would have wanted it,” said Ibrahim, whose account was confirmed by a fellow former captive, Yagana Bukar.

At military facilities and in the field, some abortions proved fatal. Although Reuters could not determine the full scope of the deaths in nearly 10 years of the programme, four soldiers and two security officers said they witnessed women die from abortions, or saw their corpses afterward.

Ibrahim said she also witnessed a woman die after an injection at the time of her own abortion near a small village in the bush – an event corroborated by her companion Bukar.

READ ALSO:

“That woman was more pregnant than the rest of us, almost six or seven months,” Ibrahim said. “She was crying, yelling, rolling around, and at long last she stopped rolling and shouting. She became so weak and traumatised, and then she stopped breathing.

“They just dug a hole, and they put sand over it and buried her.”

Reuters was unable to establish who created the abortion programme or determine who in the military or government ran it.

Nigerian military leaders denied the programme has ever existed and said Reuters reporting was part of a foreign effort to undermine the country’s fight against the insurgents.

“Not in Nigeria, not in Nigeria,” said Major General Christopher Musa, who heads the military’s counterinsurgency campaign in the northeast, in a November 24 interview with Reuters that addressed the abortion programme.

“Everybody respects life. We respect families. We respect women and children. We respect every living soul.”

General Lucky Irabor, Nigeria’s chief of defence staff, did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters. On December 2, a week after Reuters sought an interview with Irabor and shared detailed findings and questions with his office, the military’s director of defence information released a five-page statement to reporters, and later posted it on Facebook and Twitter. Major General Jimmy Akpor said Reuters was motivated by “wickedness” and a “bullying” mentality, according to the statement.

“The fictitious series of stories actually constitute a body of insults on the Nigerian peoples and culture,” Akpor added. “Nigerian military personnel have been raised, bred and further trained to protect lives, even at their own risk, especially when it concerns the lives of children, women and the elderly.”

Central to the abortion programme is a notion widely held within the military and among some civilians in the northeast: that the children of insurgents are predestined, by the blood in their veins, to one day take up arms against the Nigerian government and society. Four soldiers and one guard said they were told by superiors that the programme was needed to destroy insurgent fighters before they could be born.

“It’s just like sanitising the society,” said a civilian health worker, one of seven people who acknowledged performing abortions under army orders.

Four of the health workers interviewed by Reuters also said that the programme was for the good of the women and any children they might bear, who would face the stigma of being associated with an insurgent father.

The army-run abortion programme has been in place since at least 2013, and procedures were being performed through at least November of last year, according to accounts from soldiers.

The procedures have occurred in at least five military facilities and five civilian hospitals in the region, according to witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters. Many occurred in Maiduguri, the largest city in Nigeria’s northeast and the command centre of the government’s war on Islamist extremists.

READ ALSO:

The Maiduguri sites include the detention centre at Giwa Barracks, where Fati said she was forced to have an abortion. Other sites include the Maimalari Barracks, which is the city’s main military base, and two civilian hospitals – State Specialist and Umaru Shehu. The two hospitals did not comment on this story.

Forced abortions may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to four legal experts briefed by Reuters on its findings. Although forced abortions are not specifically criminalised under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the experts said, they could be construed as torture or other inhumane treatment and be prosecuted as such.

The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor found in 2020 that grounds existed to investigate possible war crimes and crimes against humanity by both Nigerian security forces and insurgents. But the court has not opened a probe.

The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor declined to comment on Reuters’ findings.

SaharaReporters had reported how in April 2014, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Chibok town in Borno, prompting the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. About 98 of the kidnapped girls are still missing.

Two young women, Felerin and Aisha, described undergoing abortions after being taken into custody by the Nigerian military.

Other women interviewed by Reuters offered similar accounts of captivity and rescue – including being raped by insurgents and escaping with the help of soldiers who took them into custody and transported them under armed guard to military facilities or civilian hospitals. Many said they were made to give urine or blood samples before receiving unspecified injections and pills.

Nigerian facilities often used misoprostol, which helps induce labour or contractions, according to the documentation reviewed by Reuters. The drug is also used to treat ulcers and post-partum hemorrhaging, and is widely available in Nigerian cities, including through unofficial abortion-drug distribution networks. Women sometimes were also given the progesterone-blocker called mifepristone, which in many countries is used in conjunction with misoprostol in medication abortions.

Also given was the drug oxytocin, which is widely used during labour to stimulate contractions and safe to use when under medical supervision. Though experts say it is not recommended for abortions, it was sometimes given at military bases to trigger terminations, said two soldiers who performed the procedures.

Using oxytocin to induce abortion is dangerous, several international medical experts told Reuters, particularly if it is injected intramuscularly, as soldiers involved in the Nigerian programme said it was. If the drug is administered too quickly, the results can be fatal, the experts said.

The medications misoprostol and mifepristone are considered safe for abortions when the standard medical protocol is used, according to the World Health Organization and other authorities.

Among those forced to undergo an abortion was a girl named Hafsat.

She arrived at an army base in March 2019, a skinny teen of 14 or 15, clad in a turquoise dress and covered in mosquito bites, according to a soldier present that day.

The soldier said he and other troops injected Hafsat and three others with oxytocin while they lay on the ground outside the army clinic.

Within an hour, the soldier said, he heard cries and turned to see Hafsat bleeding heavily from between her legs. He grabbed her a cloth to stanch the blood.

Hafsat began crying out for a man named Ali, and for her mother. “Half an hour later, maybe, she just went quiet,” he said. “She died.”

The soldier said he and his comrades wrapped her in her turquoise dress and buried her. The memory haunts him.

“I can’t forget her name,” he said.

The details of the soldier’s account were corroborated by a second soldier at the base, who said he also witnessed the girl’s abortion and death.

In all, eight sources, including four soldiers, said they witnessed deaths or saw corpses of women who died from abortions performed at military barracks or administered in the field.

Up Next

Fuel queues to end soon, says NMDPRA

Don't Miss

Police launch manhunt for woman who burnt parents

metro

Bandits Kill 3, Abduct 5 in Fresh Attacks on Kogi Communities

Published

5 minutes ago

April 14, 2026

Trends Admin

Kogi State Police Public Relations Officer, CSP William Ovye Aya

Bandits Kill 3, Abduct 5 in Fresh Attacks on Kogi Communities

Armed bandits have launched fresh coordinated attacks on communities in Omala and Kabba/Bunu Local Government Areas of Kogi State, leaving at least three people dead and abducting five others in renewed violence across the region.

The incidents, which occurred in separate attacks on Sunday and Monday, have heightened fear among residents, many of whom say insecurity in the area is worsening despite repeated calls for government intervention.

In the first attack, suspected armed men invaded Odae Bunu community in Kabba/Bunu LGA on Monday, April 13, 2026. The attackers reportedly abducted five residents and killed one person during the raid, which threw the community into panic as residents fled into surrounding bushes for safety.

In a separate incident, two residents were killed in Bagaji Odo community in Omala Local Government Area on Sunday, April 12, 2026. The attackers were said to have stormed the community in the early hours of the day, opening fire on residents and causing widespread fear and displacement.

READ ALSO:

Local sources also alleged that the Omala attack may have been carried out by suspected herders, although authorities have not officially confirmed the identity of the attackers. Several other residents were reportedly injured during the assault and are currently receiving treatment in undisclosed locations.

The two incidents have once again drawn attention to the growing wave of insecurity in Kogi State, particularly in rural communities where armed groups frequently target residents for killings, kidnappings, and ransom demands.

As of the time of filing this report, neither the Kogi State Government nor security agencies had issued an official statement on the latest attacks. However, residents say security presence in the affected areas remains weak, leaving communities vulnerable to repeated assaults.

Security analysts note that Kogi, located in Nigeria’s North-Central region, has become a hotspot for violent attacks due to its forested terrain and strategic location connecting several states, which allows armed groups to move easily between rural settlements.

Community leaders have renewed calls for urgent deployment of security personnel, improved intelligence gathering, and sustained military patrols to prevent further attacks and restore confidence among residents.

The latest violence adds to a growing list of similar incidents across the state in recent months, raising concerns over the effectiveness of current security responses in addressing rural banditry and communal violence.

Bandits Kill 3, Abduct 5 in Fresh Attacks on Kogi Communities

metro

Fresh Boko Haram Attack Leaves Colonel, Six Soldiers Dead in Borno

Published

8 hours ago

April 14, 2026

Trends Admin

Commanding Officer of the 242 Battalion, Monguno, Col. I.A. Mohammed

Fresh Boko Haram Attack Leaves Colonel, Six Soldiers Dead in Borno

Less than a week after the death of Brigadier General Oseni Braimah, the Nigerian military has confirmed the killing of another senior commanding officer alongside six soldiers in a fresh terrorist ambush in Monguno, Borno State.

The incident occurred during an operation under Operation Hadin Kai, the ongoing counter-terrorism campaign in the North-East.

According to a statement by the Media Information Officer, Headquarters Joint Task Force (North-East), Lieutenant Colonel Sani Uba, troops of Sector 3 came under attack in the late hours of April 12, 2026, during what was described as an isolated terrorist encounter.

The Army said the commanding officer was killed after his vehicle struck an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) while he was moving to assess frontline troops following initial contact with insurgents.

Six soldiers also lost their lives in the attack, while several others reportedly sustained injuries. The military confirmed that the insurgents were eventually repelled and the location secured after intense exchange of fire.

“The terrorists were put to flight, with troops maintaining control of the location,” the statement said, adding that the fallen officer displayed “exceptional courage and selfless service” while responding to the battlefield situation.

Although the Army did not officially release his identity, earlier reports identified the slain officer as Colonel I.A. Muhammad.

READ ALSO:

The latest killings have triggered nationwide outrage, with Nigerians expressing concern over the rising toll on security personnel engaged in the fight against insurgency in the North-East.

Security analysts say the attack highlights the continued use of IEDs and ambush tactics by Boko Haram and ISWAP fighters, who remain active in remote parts of Borno despite sustained military operations.

The incident also comes amid renewed international attention on Nigeria’s security situation. The United States Department of State recently issued a travel advisory allowing voluntary departure of non-essential personnel from its embassy in Abuja and warning against travel to several Nigerian states due to insecurity.

The advisory cited threats including insurgency in the North-East, banditry in the North-West and North-Central, and communal violence in other regions. However, the Nigerian government has downplayed the warning, insisting that most parts of the country remain stable and that security challenges are being contained.

In a related development, concerns over civilian casualties have also grown following recent military operations in Borno State, including airstrikes targeting suspected insurgent positions in the Jilli axis. The Nigerian Air Force maintained that such operations are aimed at terrorist targets, though investigations into reported civilian casualties are ongoing.

The Presidency has defended ongoing military actions, arguing that some targeted locations have been used as operational hubs by insurgents, while insisting that efforts are being made to minimise civilian harm.

Meanwhile, calls are increasing for a review of Nigeria’s counter-insurgency strategy, with experts urging greater investment in intelligence, surveillance technology, and troop welfare to reduce battlefield casualties and improve operational success.

The latest attack underscores the persistent security challenges in the North-East, where military personnel continue to face deadly encounters despite years of counter-terrorism operations.

Fresh Boko Haram Attack Leaves Colonel, Six Soldiers Dead in Borno

metro

2027: MURIC Demands Muslim Governorship Candidates in South-West

Published

22 hours ago

April 13, 2026

Trends Admin

MURIC’s Executive Director, Professor Ishaq Akintola

2027: MURIC Demands Muslim Governorship Candidates in South-West

The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has called on major political parties in Nigeria to ensure the emergence of Muslim governorship candidates in South-West states ahead of the 2027 general elections, warning that parties that ignore the demand may lose support from Muslim voters.

The organisation made the call in a statement signed by its Executive Director, Professor Ishaq Akintola, where it directly addressed leading political parties including the All Progressives Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), African Democratic Congress (ADC), Social Democratic Party (SDP) and other registered parties.

MURIC specifically urged political parties to consider Muslim candidates in Oyo, Lagos, Ogun, Ekiti, and Ondo States, insisting that Muslims should not be excluded from the race for governorship positions in the South-West geopolitical zone.

The group argued that Muslims constitute a significant population in the South-West and deserve fair representation in elective offices, particularly at the governorship level. It maintained that there are qualified Muslim politicians capable of leading the affected states and contributing to good governance.

READ ALSO:

MURIC also alleged that the current political arrangement in the South-West reflects what it described as religious imbalance, noting that governors in Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, and Osun States are currently Christians. According to the group, this situation highlights what it considers limited political inclusion of Muslims in top leadership positions in the region.

The organisation claimed that since the 2023 general elections, Muslims in the South-West have been largely excluded from governorship positions. In its statement, MURIC said, “Although Muslims constitute the majority in Yorubaland, the political leadership space of the region has been hijacked by Yoruba Christians since 2023.” It added that Muslims have been reduced to political spectators in key electoral outcomes, stressing the need for what it described as equitable political participation and inclusion.

MURIC further stated that none of the 17 Southern states in Nigeria currently has a Muslim governor, describing the development as politically significant. The group argued that this reality contradicts claims of religious domination narratives in Nigeria’s political space. It also dismissed allegations of Islamisation of the country, describing such claims as “false and baseless propaganda.”

The statement has added to ongoing political conversations ahead of the 2027 general elections, especially around issues of zoning arrangements, religious balance, and power-sharing agreements. Political analysts say such debates often intensify during election cycles, particularly in diverse regions like the South-West where both Islam and Christianity influence voter behaviour and party strategies. Political parties are expected to consider factors such as electoral strength, internal zoning arrangements, and demographic realities as they prepare for candidate selection.