Source: The New York Times

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — It had been more than a month, and Dije Ali was still locked in a military prison with her seven children.

She had thought they were being taken to safety. Her family and other villagers had been low on food and feared that Boko Haram was closing in. They ran to Nigerian soldiers for protection.

“Get in the vehicle,” Ms. Ali recalled the soldiers telling them.

But instead of being whisked to freedom, she said, her family wound up in a military detention center with 130 other women and their children, uncertain when they would be released — and why they were there.

“I didn’t know what I’d done wrong,” she said. “I was just praying God would get us out.”

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Here in northeastern Nigeria, soldiers are fighting a brutal battle with Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that has terrorized the region for years with its campaign of murder, kidnapping, rape and thievery.

But in its aggressive hunt for Boko Haram fighters, the Nigerian military has ensnared and detained scores of civilians, including toddlers and infants, for weeks or months. And sometimes, activists say, innocent people are never heard from again.

Nearly 150 people have died this year in just one of the detention centers, Giwa barracks, where Ms. Ali was held with her family, according to Amnesty International.

Eleven of the dead were children younger than 6, including four babies, it said. The prison this spring held 1,200 people, at least 120 of them children, Amnesty found.

“Many were arbitrarily rounded up during mass arrests,” the group said, “often with no evidence against them.”

Nigeria, which denies the claims, is not the only country in the region criticized as going too far in the fight against Boko Haram. Cameroon has been accused of detaining 1,000 people suspected of supporting Boko Haram, many arrested arbitrarily, in horrific conditions that have caused some to die from disease and malnutrition.

The Nigerian military says it detains people it suspects of being Boko Haram sympathizers — including people who have been kidnapped — to weed out anyone who might be dangerous.

Photo

A woman using her headscarf to protect her face during a dust storm in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that has terrorized the region for years. Credit Jane Hahn for The New York Times
Officials have reason to be suspicious: Boko Haram has managed to turn captives into suicide bombers, including children as young as 8. Mothers, boys, girls and other suicide bombers have killed hundreds of people, striking crowds at markets, schools and even camps for people who fled their homes to escape Boko Haram’s violence.

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