Some of the schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram from the town of Chibok, N.E Nigeria, last year may have been brainwashed into fighting for the Islamist militants. According to three women who claim they were held at the same Boko Haram camps as some of the girls, many of them are now being used to terrorise other captives and even carry out killings. The witnesses told the BBC’s “Panorama” programme that they had seen some of the girls flogging those unable to recite Koranic verses (most of the kidnapped girls were Christians), and also slitting the throats of male captives. The claims haven’t been independently verified, but Amnesty International said that kind of brutalisation of young girls did fit Boko Haram’s modus operandi. (Reported by the BBC and in The Week)

You don’t have to look far to see how very young, impressionable people, with few prospects, can be persuaded to do abominable things in the name of god. When the successors of the prophet Mohammed conquered a large part of the known world they were remarkably successful in making their conquests stick. Else why are there so many muslims in the world? They were not successful by beheading and torturing people (although no doubt there must have been atrocities). They taxed the non-believers. The Jews, for instance, thrived under a muslim regime in Spain, as long as they paid up; it was the Catholics who were threw them out in the name of Jesus. This modern lot so-called militant muslims are simply savages. Or maybe that’s unfair to savages?