I didn't want to ask the question. I could already guess the pain behind the answer.
"Do you think your husband is dead?"
Her mouth twists,
contorting her young face, tears welling in her already reddened eyes.
"I don't know... I
pray to God to give him another chance," she finally manages to stutter.
Her sadness is heavy and
blankets both of us.
She tells me she has three
children, and they last saw their father four months ago when he went back to
his army unit on the front line in Nigeria's battle with the radical Islamist
extremist group Boko Haram.
His friends last saw him
bloodied and shooting as Boko Haram fighters advanced and they all fled.
If all this wasn't trauma
enough, the young woman says the army has deserted her, too.
"They didn't tell me
anything, they still haven't told me what happened and they didn't pay me
anything and no one is feeding us in the barracks," she said.
We are in northern Nigeria,
a few hours' drive north of the capital where the mostly Muslim north meets the
mostly Christian south.
Just last month, a double
suicide bombing killed 12 people in a busy central market in the region.
Driving northeast of here
toward the borders with Chad, Cameroon and Niger puts you in the heart of Boko
Haram territory -- a land mass the size of Belgium.
So it's no surprise that
the area is home to many thousands of troops, and, as I am finding out, it's
also the backdrop of many more heart-wrenching stories.
A mile or so from his base,
I meet a soldier on a remote windswept hill. He is a veteran of African Union
and United Nations peacekeeping missions in Liberia and Sudan, a professional
soldier. We sit on plastic chairs as he tells me his story.
He, too, was left on the
battlefield by his comrades as they fled for safety in the face of a Boko Haram
attack. He doesn't blame them.
"The major problem the
soldiers have is they don't have the equipment to fight," he says.
Boko Haram has
anti-aircraft guns, which he says are accurate up to three-quarters of a mile.
All the Nigerian military has, he says, are AK47 small machine guns, accurate
up to a few hundred meters.
Often the Nigerian soldiers
are given only 60 bullets each, so they quickly run out. Boko Haram, he says,
has large supplies of ammunition and more fighters.
Although the Nigerian
soldiers do win some fights, he says they are regularly forced to turn tail and
run for their lives by the sheer volume of gunfire from Boko Haram fighters.
It took him three days --
on foot, alone -- to get back to his base, 70 kilometers away. When he arrived,
his wife told him to quit the army, but his troubles were only just beginning.
Army medics refused to pay
the $200 for medicine to treat his injuries. Morale in the army is sinking, he
says.
That night, I meet a young
officer, who, like the other soldier, is not authorized to talk to me. Our
conversation is held in a hurry in a tiny darkened hut that sells biscuits and
fizzy drinks at a roundabout on the outskirts of a town.
Corruption, he tells me, is
the root of the Nigerian military's problem.
"Not just the
generals... everybody in the country wants to get rich by any means
necessary," he says.
The soldiers don't ever
benefit from the billions allocated to the defense budget, he explains. He even
had to buy his own uniform.
"The troop morale is
actually very low, very low, because we are not issued a uniform, we buy the
uniforms ourselves," he explained.
The other soldier I met on
the hill told me this, too. When they go into battle, no one has the same
uniform, so when they run from Boko Haram it's chaos. They don't know who is
friend or foe -- whom to shoot and whom to help.
Most soldiers live in fear,
the young officer tells me. A fear of what will happen to them, and how long
they can survive in this battle, he says.
The worrying doesn't stop
there. They see enough war widows on the base to know the grim reality of what
can happen to their loved ones if they die.
A widow I meet explains.
Her husband was killed in battle over a year ago, she tells me.
"When my husband died,
they never called me to tell me that I lost my husband," she says.
"They buried him without notifying me."
She gets no army pension,
and she says there are many more like her: they feel abandoned, afraid to speak
out because they still live in the barracks.
Government officials tell
us they will look into these shortcomings, that they are working on getting
better weapons for the troops.
If they do, according to
the soldiers I met, it will easily turn the tide in this war.
Culled From Cnn
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