A woman who witnessed the regime of the bloodthirsty terrorist group in Bama, on Wednesday narrated her ordeal to Daily Trust correspondent.
The woman who did not want her name in print said she left the town on the eve of Nigerian troops offensive to re-take Bama from Boko Haram.
She revealed that trapped Bama residents were forced to accept the new regime of Boko Haram insurgents who introduced alien rules and order in the town for more seven months.
The defence headquarters, in a statement issued on Monday, said troops had expelled Boko Haram from Bama with massive casualty inflicted on members of the terrorists group.
But the woman told BBC Hausa service that just before the troops launch the offensive, the terrorists had gotten hint of it and ordered all residents out of the town in preparation to set the whole town ablaze.
“We spent seven months, two weeks together with Boko Haram in Bama. They took women and children to ‘Halka,’ that is where they detain people. Therefore, they run away with all the ladies and children of Bama, who were detained in Halka,” she said.
When asked about the age of the children, she placed their age bracket between seven, eight and nine years old.
“They are all young children. They used to bring food to both the detained women and the children. But sometimes, they denied people the chance to eat food. There was a time we spent two days without cooking anything at our homes,” she said.
When she was asked how they left the town and responded to the rule: “We were at home when we began to see smoke in the sky. We first thought that was coming from the military personnel, but the smoke kept on increasing. When we went out to observe, we saw people running helter-skelter and Boko Haram were following, urging people to exit Bama. They were saying that Bama would be condemned on that day and that anybody who refuses to leave the town, they would burn them completely.”
Bama town which is about 60 km (40 miles) southeast of the state capital Maiduguri was captured by members of the Boko Haram terrorist group last year September and has been under the control of the Islamist terrorists as they continued their six-year-old insurgency in a bid to establish an Islamic state.
The fight for Bama according to a security source started since last week and finally made headway at the weekend when Nigerian troops recaptured it from the terrorists after troops have reportedly flushed them out from Adamawa and Yobe states.
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