[ExpressUK] THEY are Africa's new and terrified diaspora: thousands of women fleeing across harsh, arid scrubland to escape Islamic fanatics who want to enslave them at home in northern Nigeria.Refugee crises have blighted Africa's history but the recent abduction of 276 schoolgirls is unparalleled.
An estimated 60,000 women and their children have fled across the border into Niger in the past year alone to escape brutal Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
The fundamentalists with links to Al Qaeda are funded by the illegal ivory trade, slaughtering wild elephants.
They show no mercy in their crusade to stop female education either, murdering and torturing those who stand in their way and burning villages.
Last night the International Rescue Committee reported that up to 1,000 refugees a week, 80 per cent female, are pouring into neighbouring Niger's Diffa region from Borno state, where the schoolgirls were kidnapped from Chibok school in April.
"The stories the refugees tell us are terrible," says Matias Meier, IRC country director in Niger. "At times they have had to run over corpses of people who have been shot or have drowned as they attempted to cross Lake Chad.
"There is a worry that if more humanitarian aid does not arrive soon, some mothers will be forced into prostitution to feed their children."
IRC says 18,000 people have escaped to Diffa this year, joining 40,000 refugees who fled there last year. By the end of the year, as many as 100,000 could be trying to survive on the harsh, impoverished landscape.
It has set up reception centres to provide emergency support while reuniting separated children with relatives and giving them safe places to maintain their education.
Unicef, the world's leading organization for helping children, is preparing for another operation to ensure the kidnapped schoolgirls are reconciled with their families and communities.As fears grow that they may be being sold into slavery or forced marriages to be sexually abused, rescued girls will need expert counselling and support to readjust to everyday life.
With the world united in condemning the abduction, Britannia has sent an expert search team from the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence.