Around 6:30 P.M. on an evening in April, 2013, Aisha Yerima was at her home in Banki, a town in northeast Nigeria. Aisha was twenty-one, slim and dark-skinned, her face wrapped in a hijab. She had been raised in Maiduguri, the nearby capital of Borno state, and, unlike many girls in the region, she had attended the Government Girls Secondary School. “I am educated,” she boasted to me, recently. When she graduated, at fifteen, her family married her off to a man named Mustapha. But after seven years the couple divorced, and Mustapha took custody of their three-year-old son. Aisha was preparing to move back in with her parents, and she was chatting with her former in-laws about the move when she heard gunshots. She looked out the window and saw militants from the jihadist group Boko Haram advancing on a unit of Nigerian soldiers, who were stationed in town and appeared to be outnumbered. As the militants fired on the buildings, residents scrambled for safety. In the chaos, Aisha ran in a different direction from her ex-husband and child. She made her way to a grove of trees and hid for what seemed like hours, panting and praying. That evening, the militants found her and loaded her onto a truck bed, along with dozens of women and children. “I was among those captured and taken away into the forest,” she said.

Since its founding in northern Nigeria, in 2002, Boko Haram has razed villages and massacred townspeople in an effort to establish an Islamic caliphate in the region, which is largely Muslim. The militants have bombed dozens of public places, including the United Nations building and the national police headquarters, both in Abuja, the country’s capital. In 2011, the government launched an offensive, forcing the militants to flee from their base in Maiduguri into the Sambisa Forest, a former game reserve. Nigerian soldiers destroyed their homes and arrested any family members left behind, including the widow of Mohammed Yusuf, Boko Haram’s founder, and the wife and children of Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader. Shekau threatened retaliation; since then, the militants have kidnapped thousands of girls and women, using them as servants and marrying them to militants against their will. In 2014, Boko Haram abducted two hundred and seventy-six girls from a school dormitory in Chibok, prompting a global campaign for their release—led by spokeswomen including Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai—called Bring Back Our Girls.

Aisha was driven through a dense tangle of tamarind and baobab trees, deep into the Sambisa Forest. After hours of travelling, the group arrived at a clearing filled with zinc-roofed buildings and tarpaulin tents, home to scores of militants and their families. The women were taken to a tent and fed dates—known in the Hausa language as dabino. Dates are revered in Islam: during Ramadan, the Prophet broke his fast with them, and many Muslims do the same today. Locals believe that militants place charms on the dabino that they feed their captives, in order to bewitch them. Some former captives have told me that they surreptitiously avoided eating the dates. Aisha did not believe that they were enchanted, but she was struck by the gentleness with which the militants fed them the fruit. They offered the women water to drink and encouraged them to get some rest. “That was when I started realizing that they were not as bad as people said they were,” she said.

Aisha began her life in captivity as a slave, running errands and doing chores for the wives of the militants and spending eleven hours a day in Quran classes. The captives were all kept in a single small tent, and militants came each day to select wives from among them. Almost immediately, a man named Mamman Nur began courting Aisha. Nur was a senior commander, or amir, and a close adviser to Shekau. He is thought to have been the mastermind behind the U.N. bombing, in 2011; shortly after the attack, the Nigerian government set a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. But to Aisha he was tender. Whenever he visited the tent, he paid her compliments and sang her songs in Arabic. “He was very romantic,” she said. “He showered me with gifts, like expensive wrappers, jewelry, and so on—any of the kind of things that women like.”

Four months into her captivity, Aisha married Nur and moved into his home. “I was the last of his four wives, and his favorite,” she said. “Anytime I wanted to be with him, he put every other thing aside to satisfy my needs.” About a year into their marriage, Aisha gave birth to a son. Each wife was allocated a different section of the house, and Aisha began to quarrel with Nur’s second wife, who she thought was jealous, always peeping into Aisha’s room whenever Nur visited. Eventually, Aisha asked Nur to divorce his second wife, and he agreed. “None could get him to do her bidding except me,” she said. As a commander’s wife, or amira, Aisha had scores of slaves—other recent female captives—who did her chores. “The only task I didn’t allow them to do for me was preparing my husband’s meals,” she said. “I preferred handling that myself.” She dismissed any slave who seemed to have her eyes on Nur, instructing that she be taken back to the tent where the other female captives lived. Militants feared and respected Aisha. “The men could hardly look me in the eye,” she said. “They always spoke to me with their heads bowed.”

Aisha’s account of her captivity differs sharply from those of hundreds of other women, who returned home with stories of brutal sexual violence. She insists that she was never harmed. “No one raped me or even once attempted to rape me,” she said. All extramarital sexual relations were strictly prohibited in her camp, and men found guilty were punished by death. The camp’s residents were compelled to watch the executions. “They would bury the person in the ground with his head sticking out of the hole, then slit his throat,” Aisha said. “Anyone who was caught not looking while the person was being killed, he too would be punished.” An official ban on sexual violence seems to be consistent across Boko Haram’s territory. “You are supposed to protect women,” Aminu Shagari, a Quranic scholar and former Boko Haram commander, told me. “You should not allow anyone to harm them.” However, women interviewed by Amnesty International in 2014–15 reported that Boko Haram members secretly raped them at night. Several Chibok girls told me that militants took advantage of their classmates during periods when military air raids threw their usually regimented camps into chaos, forcing women and men to mix. Many women also told me that they were pressed into marriages and then forced to have sex with their new husbands—a form of sexual violence that Boko Haram does not recognize as a crime.

Aisha was not the only prisoner who began to identify with her captors. In 2014, Zara John, a chirpy fourteen-year-old, was kidnapped from Izghe, a village near Banki. She watched the militants burn down the homes in her village and kill the men. She was loaded onto a truck with her mother and driven to Bita, a town near the Sambisa Forest that was then under Boko Haram’s control. During the journey, her mother fell off the truck and chased after it on foot for several miles before giving up. “As soon as we arrived, they told us that we were now their slaves,” she said. Zara was soon fed a meal of dabino. She is convinced that the charms in the dates were responsible for how her feelings about Boko Haram changed during her captivity. “I was not in my right mind,” she said.