Taken from their homes by Boko Haram fighters, these Nigerian women were held captive for months — some even longer. They escaped. But going home is another matter.
Laraba Bitrus was working in a small grocer’s shop in the northeastern Nigerian town of Gwoza when Boko Haram militants invaded. With nowhere to run, the armed men took her captive, beat her with a whip, and forced her to watch as they sawed off her uncle’s head. After 11 days, she fled on foot, traveling through the bush to Madagali, where she stayed until the extremists took over that small town as well, forcing her to flee again: this time further south to Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, where she now lives in the catholic St. Theresa's refugee camp.
She was one of the lucky ones. More than six years into their bloody campaign in northern Nigeria and the surrounding Lake Chad region, Boko Haram extremists have killed around 20,000 people. Entire villages have been razed to the ground; men and boys executed or forcibly recruited to join the militants’ ranks; and women and girls taken against their will as wives and household slaves. As part of the group’s brutal effort to establish an Islamic caliphate ruled under a strict interpretation of sharia, its militants have conducted mass rape. And though Yola is safer than the most besieged areas of the country farther north, it is not free from the fear imposed by the group, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in March 2015. Thousands of displaced people are still seeking shelter in the city of 350,000 residents. Despite some critical military successes on the part of the Nigerian government, and a regional taskforce supported by Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Benin, which have caused the group to lose control of much of its territory (an area once estimated as the size of Belgium), Boko Haram continues to terrorize parts of Nigeria. Women are especially vulnerable. These photographs were taken in a safe location in Yola, away from the St. Theresa's refugee camp on a hot day in January. There was a single room set aside, where these portraits — of some 40 women — could be taken in relative quiet from the morning through the afternoon. Apart from the bits of conversation and interview, the only noise was the audible click of the camera’s shutter. The only source of light came from the room’s one window.