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on August 11, 2025
LONDON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - Britain said there were still significant gaps between its position and the European Union over post-Brexit trade arrangements for Northern Ireland, saying the bloc must address issues London has raised.
They blew up the hut where the boy slept. In the end, the Nigerian military decided Bana's fate.
One morning about four years ago, when he was roughly 3, the military launched an airstrike on the camp. Aisha, who was nearby, ran to save him but was too late.
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After talks between British Brexit minister David Frost and the EU Commission's Maros Sefcovic, a British government spokesperson said triggering emergency unilateral provisions in the Brexit deal was still a legitimate option.
She hoped one day to have children. Unlike some fathers in the region, she said, hers had made a priority of securing an education for his girls, and he never beat them. In high school, Aisha had a boyfriend in a neighboring village whom she hoped to marry.
She said she dreamt of becoming a soldier, an accountant or even a doctor - a secure livelihood in the economically depressed region.
The rainy season had nourished her father's grain, pushing the stalks knee-high. Dec 14 (Reuters) - Aisha vividly recalls her family's last time together.
It was a pleasant evening in the summer of 2014, in her Nigerian village near the Cameroon border. Her father, mother, two brothers and a younger sister were all at home.
Lying in the insurgent camp's infirmary, she plotted her escape, intent on saving Fatima from a future of hunger and rape under the militants.
By then, she had been in captivity for more than three years. Aisha took months to recover after the bombing attack.
The following day, they told Aisha she had a vaginal infection. They injected two vials of medicine into her buttocks, without telling her what it was, and gave her an assortment of pills, she said.
An hour later, she said, she was in wrenching pain and began bleeding heavily from her vagina.
A local pharmacist told her the child must have been bitten by a bug and gave her a syrup to lower her temperature. After their arrival at the family's former home, within hours of the injections, Fatima started acting strangely, Aisha said.
She would not breastfeed, her eyes became distant and glassy, and she developed a fever.
Thousands of women and girls have been kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by Boko Haram and its Islamic State offshoot. That war is being carried out, in part, upon the bodies of women and children.
Aisha said she can't forget the woman's head and body dangling as blood spurted from her. The insurgents took the woman, in her 50s, to the village square and, in front of as many people as they could gather, beheaded her with an axe. She began to feel terrified.
Aisha's ordeal encompasses some of the most extreme hardships the war has inflicted upon civilians: northridge learning center slc enslavement by Boko Haram, forced abortion by the military, the loss of one child in a military bombing and another, she suspects, to poisoning by soldiers.
The war also took the life of a brother, in addition to her mother, and all but destroyed one of her arms, Aisha said.
Aisha smiled as she recalled her younger days, when she would pound, roll and fry "kuli kuli," a peanut treat she sold with her mother at the market near their farm.
Her family was sustained both by her mother's work and her father's cultivation of maize, st peters jobs guinea corn and millet.
Later in the morning, neighbors who heard Aisha's sobs came to help her bury the tiny body in the local cemetery.
One neighbor, Musa, confirmed Aisha's account of that episode, saying he saw the girl before she died, and saw Aisha grieving afterward.
After leaving the camp, Aisha and her sister stayed for a short time with an aunt in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, but she treated them as a burden, saying they had "the attitudes" of Boko Haram, Aisha said.
Dozens of women in northeast Nigeria told Reuters of similarly wrenching experiences during the ongoing strife, which has claimed more than 300,000 lives, including those of civilians killed by violence, starvation and disease.
After they reunited, she said, Aisha shared the details of her life during their time apart - including her escape, the abortion and the suspected poisoning of Fatima. The sister, who said she'd been a servant to the wife of a high-ranking Boko Haram leader during her captivity, had not seen Aisha since their arrival in Sambisa Forest.
Aisha spoke to Reuters on condition that only her Muslim name be used, citing fear for her safety. Reuters is not naming her village, as well, to protect her identity.
Her story was corroborated in part by her sister; a friend and fellow captive; one of her brothers; and a neighbor. These people spoke on condition they not be fully named. Each said they witnessed some of the events or heard about them afterward from Aisha.