Leah Sharibu Is Still a Slave—and the World Has Moved On

Leah Sharibu was fourteen years old when Islamic terrorists stormed her school and dragged her away.

That was February 19, 2018.

She was taken with 109 other schoolgirls. Eventually, the others were released. Leah was kept behind for one reason: she refused to deny Jesus Christ and claim to be a Muslim.

“If they want to kill me, they can do so,” she reportedly said, “but I will not claim to be a Muslim. This is not my faith.”

For that confession, Leah was enslaved.

She was trafficked. She was forced to bear a child. She was then forced to marry a commander of the Islamic State West Africa Province and bear him more children. When that commander died, she was not released. She was handed to another senior terrorist and forced to bear another child.

Leah is now believed to have four children by the men who enslaved her.

She has been forced to become a terrorist’s bride, forced to bear the children of her captors, and forced to live inside a religious system she rejected as a fourteen-year-old girl.

And she is still there.

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Leah is not missing. We know what happened to her.

She is a Christian woman being held in sexual and religious slavery while much of the world looks away.

Leah has a name and a face. That makes her story difficult to ignore.

But there are countless other Leahs across Nigeria whose names will never appear in a newspaper.

The official numbers often cited for kidnapping in Nigeria hover around 5,000 per year. Those working in affected communities believe the real number is far higher—possibly reaching into the hundreds of thousands or even millions when unreported abductions are considered.

We do not know the exact number.

We know it is not merely 5,000.

In June 2026 alone, Fulani militants kidnapped dozens of Christians in Kaduna State. Gunmen stopped traffic on a highway in Kogi and abducted approximately 30 Christian travelers. In Taraba, another 50 people were kidnapped.

Those were only a few incidents in one month.

Behind those numbers are children watching their parents beaten. Mothers wondering whether their daughters will be sold. Fathers trying to decide whether paying a ransom will save their family or finance the next attack.

One survivor named Joel was held in a camp so brutal that his ten-year-old brother starved to death beside him.

Joel was beaten when he tried to use the bathroom. By the time he was released, he looked like a Holocaust survivor.

Not every kidnapping in Nigeria is human trafficking. Some victims are taken for ransom. Some are tortured. Some are murdered simply to terrorize Christian communities.

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But many women and girls are trafficked.

They are raped, enslaved, forced into marriages, and compelled to bear children for the men who stole them.

This is not merely organized crime.

It is often religiously justified slavery.

There is an enormous effort in the West to discuss Islamic terrorism without discussing Islam.

We are expected to speak vaguely about “violent extremists,” “armed groups,” and “religious tensions.” We are allowed to condemn the bloodshed as long as we never ask what the killers believe.

But the girls being held in terrorist camps do not have the luxury of our politically correct evasions.

Their captors have an ideology.

Their captors have texts.

Their captors believe those texts give them a right to take women in war.

Qur’an 4:24 forbids relations with married women, except for those “whom your right hands possess.” Historically, this language has been understood to refer to women captured and enslaved during warfare—even women who already had husbands before their capture.

Qur’an 23:5–6 permits sexual relations with wives and those “whom their right hands possess.”

The Hadith account surrounding the Battle of Awtas has also been used to justify intercourse with captured women whose husbands remained alive among the enemy.

Islamic terrorists do not have to invent a completely new theology to justify the enslavement of Christian women. They can reach backward into Islamic texts and history and find a framework already waiting for them.

When jihadists believe they are engaged in holy war against Christians, the kidnapping of Christian girls is not always viewed as a sinful violation of their religion.

It can be viewed as a reward of war.

It can be viewed as a right.

It can be viewed as obedience.

That is why Leah Sharibu was not simply kidnapped for ransom. She was forced into a system in which her captors believed they could possess her body, assign her a husband, and use her to bear children for their movement.

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Fundamentalist Islam does not merely fail to stop this trafficking.

It can provide the theological permission for it.

Pretending otherwise will not rescue a single girl.