She faked a religious conversion to escape terrorists

Maiduguri, Nigeria: For more than six years, Alice Loksha Ngaddah bided her time, waiting for an opportunity to escape her abductors.

She had been kidnapped in Nigeria by a splinter group of Boko Haram, one of the world's deadliest terrorist groups.

Her moment to flee arrived in October, when Loksha, the 3-year-old son she gave birth to in captivity and another abductee, Fayina Ali Akilawus, slipped out of the militants' camp at dusk. They traveled by donkey, ox cart, boat and car for more than three days until arriving at a military outpost in northeastern Nigeria.

As they neared their destination, the women erupted in praises to Jesus, shouting, "We are really saved," Loksha recalled, speaking to The New York Times this past week in her only interview since regaining freedom.

When she was abducted, Loksha became one of the highest-profile of the thousands of people Boko Haram has kidnapped over the past decade. She was a nurse and mother of two, working for UNICEF at a clinic in Rann, Nigeria, an area of intense conflict between the military and Boko Haram. She took the job to earn money for her mother's dementia care, despite the risks.

After work one day in March 2018, she and several other aid workers went to the military base in Rann to use the Wi-Fi to call their families. Suddenly gunfire erupted, the aid workers hit the ground, and an intense battle unfolded around them. Fighters charged into the room, killing and wounding some of the aid workers.

Loksha and two midwives were forced into a truck by the terrorists and taken away, driving all night into the bush. She would spend the next six years focused on survival and escape.

Forcible Marriage

After 11 days of being moved around by their captors, Loksha and the midwives were brought to Kangaruwa, a camp run by the group that took them, Islamic State West Africa Province, a Boko Haram offshoot.

For the first few months, the insurgents left the women alone. The militants made contact with the aid organizations the women had worked for and the Nigerian government, trying to extract ransoms and the release of imprisoned comrades. When their demands were not met, they became angry and told the women to expect the worst.

"The nation will be surprised," Loksha said the fighters told them.

On Sept. 16, Saifura Khorsa, one of the two midwives, felt particularly uneasy. "Maybe they are coming to take us home," Loksha remembered her saying. It was the woman's birthday, so Loksha tried to lift her spirits by cracking jokes and doing her hair.

Vehicles full of fighters appeared and took Khorsa away. She was executed that day, Loksha learned later. The other midwife, Hauwa Mohammed Liman, was killed the following month. Both women were Muslim; the Islamic militants said they deserved to die because they had betrayed their faith by working for the Red Cross.

When Boko Haram emerged in 2009, its leaders openly preached violence against Christians. Its deadly net soon widened to include northern Nigeria's Muslim majority. The group has abducted and killed thousands of Muslim women, and forcibly "married" some of them to fighters.

Common criminals rather than religious zealots make up the bulk of the group's ranks these days, said Allen Manasseh, a youth leader at the forefront of a campaign to release Boko Haram captives. "It's now a criminal enterprise that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with religion," he said.

Still, Loksha is convinced that being a Christian is what saved her from the midwives' fate. Like most abducted Christian women, she was considered an infidel who didn't know any better.

In captivity, she used her skills as a nurse and midwife to treat her captors' injuries and deliver babies. Prized for this reason, she was handed over to a senior commander as a sex slave.

Pretending to Be Muslim

Less than a year after her abduction, Loksha told her captors she would convert to Islam, and took a Muslim name, Halima. "I had to join them because I can't beat them, so that is what I did," she said.

She pantomimed the rituals while holding her Christian faith close to her heart, praying in private. "We had to be Muslims when we are there, for us to gain freedom," she said of herself and other Christian captives.

She was enslaved first by Abu Umar, one of the terrorist group's top five commanders at the time of her abduction. Giving birth to his son, Mohammed, elevated her status to that of wife.

The commander was stoned to death in 2021 for committing adultery by sleeping with a Muslim abductee. Loksha was then married to another high-ranking commander, Abu Simak.

Her associations earned her special privileges, like a proper home, adequate food and a modicum of privacy. (When she escaped, she looked healthy and well-fed.) She also persuaded four other enslaved Christian women to embrace fake conversion, trusting them to keep her secret.

"I cannot hide things to you, because you are my sister," she recalls thinking of the Christian women. "We are one." All along, she told her captors she was content to live her life as "Auntie Halima."

In October 2023, when she met Akilawus, the woman with whom she would eventually escape, they formed an instant bond. The very first night they met, they held hands and prayed together and talked about their lives and dreams of freedom. "We did not close our eyes till the next day," Loksha recalled. "She was brought to me so that we can put heads together."

Akilawus, who was captured by Boko Haram in 2020 while traveling by car in Nigeria, had tried to escape three times before meeting Loksha. She was quickly recaptured each time, jailed for months, chained and severely beaten. "We say it's only God that will rescue us, because we don't have anybody," she told the Times.

Loksha told the militants she had persuaded Akilawus to convert to Islam. The move allowed the two women to stay together in Loksha's straw house and earned her even more trust.

While living together, they slowly began to sell items from the house -- curtains, rugs, bits of zinc roofing -- to amass money to fund their escape. When they had saved enough, they sought help from a woman from the largely nomadic Fulani ethnic group, who are experts in traversing the bush and have helped other escapees.

In exchange for about $90 -- more than most Nigerian workers earn in two months -- the woman's husband surveyed the militants' property and devised an escape route.

A Perilous Flight

On Oct. 24, just after the 6 p.m. prayers when everyone was sure to be resting, the women slipped out with just two changes of clothing, their rudimentary electronic devices and money. Loksha gave Mohammed half a dose of diazepam, a sedative, to keep him calm.

The Fulani woman led them to her husband, who was hiding in the bush a three-hour walk from the camp, with a pair of donkeys. They rode through the night for the next two days. When it was clear they had left the bush -- and the territory controlled by Boko Haram -- they sighed in relief. At a village, the Fulani man handed them off to one of his brothers.

They set off on a three-hour trek on a cow-drawn wooden cart, crossed two rivers and hiked three more hours to Diffa, a town in Niger on Nigeria's northeast border. Their journey had not yet ended. There was still a two-hour car ride to the Nigerian town of Geidam.

The women burst into prayer as they approached the town. The driver, who was Muslim, kept repeating the word "Sorry," Loksha recalled, and drove them straight to the nearest Nigerian military checkpoint.

Uncertain future

Some women and girls who escape Boko Haram have been raped by Nigerian troops, but Loksha said the soldiers treated the women with kindness, providing them with good food, clothes and new phones. The military took them to Maiduguri, a city in northeast Nigeria, and handed them over to state government officials last week.

Boko Haram has no overt presence now in Maiduguri, as it did a decade ago, but it is still powerful in the region. A single attack in September left over 170 people dead.

Loksha believes Boko Haram spies are everywhere in Nigeria, and that the militants will try to stop her from exposing secrets she learned in captivity, such as locations and names. "I know that they may not like to see me alive," she said. "Nowhere is safe."

The lives that await both her and Akilawus are much different from the ones they left behind. Akilawus was engaged when she was kidnapped; her groom-to-be has long since moved on. Loksha is 42. Her son, now 13, sat silently as she recently tried to talk to him by video. Her 7-year-old daughter doesn't remember her at all. Her husband remarried not long after she was taken.

On Wednesday, she was reunited with her sisters, Comfort Shetima and Joy "Kaka" Atigogo, in Maiduguri. Joy flew into Loksha's arms, laughing and sobbing while Comfort enveloped them both.

When the sisters broke the news that their mother had died just a few weeks after Loksha's abduction, she wailed, "Mama," and wept, swaying as her friend and younger sister comforted her. Mohammed sat on his Auntie Joy's lap and wiped away his mother's tears.

Loksha's safety is still uncertain. The military received credible information this past week that her captors were looking for her. She said she was prepared for this possibility, and for whatever else might come her way.

"The same God that gave me that courage will be the same God that will lead me further," she said. "To move on, you forget about the past."