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KADUNA, Nigeria (AP) — By the time she ran away, she bore the scars of an abused woman anywhere - a swollen face, a starved body, and, barely a year after her wedding, a divorce. But for Maimuna Abdullahi, it all happened by the time she was 14.

Maimuna is one of thousands of divorced girls in Nigeria, who were forced into marriage and have since run away or been thrown out by their husbands. They are victims of a belief that girls should get wed rather than educated, which led Boko Haram terrorists to abduct more than 200 schoolgirls two months ago and threaten to marry them off.

"I'm too scared to go back home," Maimuna whispers, as she fiddles nervously with her hands. "I know they will force me to go back to my husband."

Her former husband, Mahammadu Saidu, 28, does not deny beating her, and blames her few years of school for her disobedience.

"She had too much ABCD," he says. "Too much ABCD."

Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, despite a law that sets the age of consent at 18. The custom of child marriage is still ingrained enough that even a federal senator has married five child brides and divorced one.

Across the country, one in five girls marry before 15, according to the United Nations. In the poor Muslim north, where child marriage is often considered acceptable under shariah or Islamic law, that number goes up to one in two. Some child brides are as young as 9.

There are no official numbers for just how many of these girls get divorced, leaving them destitute, but they are all too visible. A few miles away, girls Maimuna's age and younger are selling their bodies to truck drivers.

"Nobody knows how many thousands of them there are," says Saadatu Aliyu, the founder of a private school for divorced girls that Maimuna now attends. "That's why we have so many prostitutes, and very young ones, in the north."

At 45, Maimuna's father, Haruna Abdullahi, has been married for 30 years and has fathered eight children. He says his culture allows girls to go to their husband's houses from the age of 12. His wife, Rabi Abdullahi, was a child bride, although she does not know exactly how old.

"It is our way of life," she says. "In my day, a bride would never dare to run away."

In this desperately poor region, a child marriage brings in a bride price and means one less mouth to feed. So in late 2012, Maimuna's father arranged to marry his eldest daughter to his best friend's eldest son. The son, Saidu, paid a dowry of $210 — more cash than Abdullahi has had in his life.

She was 13, he twice her age. Saidu, a farmer, says he waited years for Maimuna to reach what he considers marriageable age.

"When she was a kid, I would bring her candy and call her 'wifey,'" says Saidu, who cannot read or write. "We were always meant to be together."

Maimuna begged her father to let her stay in school, but her wishes were not up for discussion. The link between child marriage and education is clear: Only 2 percent of married girls in Nigeria go to school, compared to 69 percent of unmarried girls. Three out of four married girls cannot read at all.

Many of Maimuna's friends from school were already married, and not one was happy. She got no advice, on warning of what to expect from the marriage bed.

She settled into a new life where she worked in the fields, cleaned, carried water and firewood and cooked. Every day she was exhausted, and when she finally got to bed, her husband wanted to "bother" her, she says. He never kept his promise to let her go to school. When she objected to her treatment, he locked her into their hut, for days.

Nine months ago, she fled to her father and begged to return home. Instead, he whipped her until her back was raw, then forced her to go back to her husband.

Saidu, humiliated and furious, slapped her repeatedly in the face. She fled once again, first to a sympathetic aunt and then to a cousin in Kaduna.

When Maimuna showed up at the Tattalli Free School for divorced girls, she had been badly beaten and refused to speak, says teacher Victoria Dung. Doctors found she was badly malnourished. The whip marks on her back may last a lifetime.

Her husband waited three months to make sure there was no baby. Then he divorced her. Under shariah law, a man can get divorced by declaring the divorce aloud three times.

Maimuna considers herself among the lucky ones because she is back at school.

"I pray that what I have done will help the younger ones, that my parents learn from the experience of my running away from home," she says.

It is by no means certain.

Maimuna's father denies beating his daughter, and says he is happy she is getting educated. Yet he gets visibly angry when he describes the financial problem she has left him.

Saidu is demanding his money back, because he wants to look for another bride. But Abdullahi has already spent it on land. Asked if he will treat his five younger daughters differently, he looks down at the ground.

"I would allow my daughters to go to school if I had the money. I have seen what happens, otherwise," he says. "But my reason is poverty, always financial problems. What can I do but give them out in marriage?"

Saidu, in the meantime, says he will move ahead with his life.

"This time I will marry a girl of 12, so that she will do what I want to do," he says. "Because if you marry a girl who is older, then she will not listen to you."

His eyes slide to the porch, where Maimuna's 10-year-old sister, Hafsat, is cuddling a neighbor's baby. A sly smile curls his lips.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's top Shiite cleric stepped up the pressure Friday on politicians to agree on Iraq's next prime minister, after incumbent Nouri al-Maliki lost the confidence of former allies in the fight against Sunni militants.

The appeal by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani comes as al-Maliki is fighting to keep his job, with even key patron Iran exploring alternatives in the face of Iraq's worst crisis since U.S. troops withdrew at the end of 2011.

The conflict has drawn the Americans back to Iraq with special forces being deployed to help Iraqi troops. The U.S. also has started flying armed drones over Baghdad to protect U.S. interests in the Iraqi capital, a Pentagon official said Friday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the new flights on the record.

Al-Maliki, who has governed the country since 2006, needs support from other parties after his State of Law bloc won the most seats in the elections but failed to gain the majority needed to govern alone. That set the stage for potentially months of coalition negotiations. But now a new government is wanted urgently to face the lightning advance across the north and west of the country by the al-Qaida breakaway Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The stunning gains were made possible in large part because Iraqi security forces melted away in the face of the onslaught.

Human Rights Watch released a report Friday about the killings of scores of police and soldiers by the Sunni militants in the days after it captured the northern city of Mosul on June 10 then stormed south to capture Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

The killings were widely reported after the Islamic State posted graphic, online photos showing dozens of men wearing civilian clothes lined up and bent over as militants pointed rifles at them from behind. A final set of photos shows bodies.

Human Rights Watch said that based on analysis of the photos and satellite imagery, the militants killed between 160 to 190 men in two locations in Tikrit between June 11 and June 14.

"The number of victims may well be much higher, but the difficulty of locating bodies and accessing the area has prevented a full investigation," the group said.

Human Rights Watch said it used satellite imagery from 2013 and publicly available photos taken earlier to pinpoint the site of the killings in a field next to the Tigris River and near one of Saddam's former palaces. It said satellite imagery of the site from June 16 did not reveal bodies but showed indications of earth movement consistent with the two shallow trenches visible in the photos, in which the soldiers were forced to lie down before being shot.

"The photos and satellite images from Tikrit provide strong evidence of a horrible war crime that needs further investigation," Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Chief Iraqi military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi confirmed the online photos' authenticity on June 15, after they first surfaced, and told The Associated Press at the time that an examination of the images by military experts showed that about 170 soldiers were shot to death after their capture.

Captions on the photos showing the soldiers after they were shot say "hundreds have been liquidated," but the total could not be verified.

The massacre appeared to be aimed at instilling fear in Iraq's demoralized armed forces as well as the country's Shiite majority, whom the Islamic State views as apostates.

But evidence points to atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict, rights groups say.

Amnesty International said Friday that it has evidence that suggests "a pattern of extrajudicial executions" of mainly Sunni detainees by government forces and Shiite militias in Tal Afar, Mosul and Baqouba. It based its conclusions on interviews with survivors and relatives of those killed.

The Baqouba killings, in which Shiite militiamen shot dead nearly four dozen Sunni detainees in a city jail, have been widely reported. Amnesty said its report shows "a worrying pattern of reprisal attacks against Sunnis" in retaliation for the insurgent gains.

On the military front, a senior Iraqi army official told the AP that four helicopters carrying Iraqi commandos landed at a soccer pitch inside a university campus in militant-held Tikrit late Thursday and clashed with Islamic State fighters for several hours.

One of the helicopters developed mechanical problems after takeoff from Tikrit, 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of Baghdad, but landed safely in the provincial military headquarters. The official had no word on casualties and declined to specify the mission's objectives. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

The official also said 200 troops have arrived at a key refinery north of Baghdad under attack by militants for more than a week. The reinforcing troops join a 100-strong contingent that has been defending the Beiji refinery, Iraq's largest and the source of about a quarter of the country's oil product needs, including fuel for power stations.

State-run television aired footage Friday purporting to show troops disembarking from helicopters at Beiji, with some carrying boxes of supplies. Dense black smoke was rising from what appeared to be a large fuel tank.

The news from Tikrit and Beiji suggested that Iraq's military was stepping up efforts to regain its footing against the insurgents, who appear to be trying to carve out a self-styled Islamic state astride the Iraqi-Syrian border.

On Friday, al-Maliki warned army commanders that militants were likely to try to undermine security in the Iraqi capital ahead of Tuesday's parliamentary session. "Baghdad must be secured and not subjected to any instability at this time," he said in televised comments.

Al-Maliki sounded upbeat on the military situation, saying the armed forces have regained the initiative and were now on the offensive. He cited Thursday's Tikrit raid as an example. He also vowed to severely punish army commanders whom he said were taking bribes from soldiers to allow them to stay home.

The United States and other world powers have pressed al-Maliki, in office since 2006, to reach out to the country's Sunni and Kurdish minorities and have called for a more inclusive government that can address longstanding grievances. But he has instead widely been accused of monopolizing power and alienating Sunnis, and his failure to promote national reconciliation has been blamed for fueling the Sunni anger.

Al-Sistani also called on Iraq's politicians to agree on the next parliament speaker and president by the time the new legislature meets on Tuesday, a cleric who represents him told worshippers in a Friday sermon in the holy city of Karbala.

Abdul-Mahdi al-Karbalaie told worshippers that would be a "prelude to the political solution that everyone seeks at the present."

The reclusive al-Sistani, the most revered figure among Iraqi Shiites, rarely appears or speaks in public, instead delivering messages through other clerics or, less frequently, issuing edicts.

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Associated Press writers Ryan Lucas in Baghdad and Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Mexican law enforcement on Thursday crossed into Arizona by helicopter and fired two shots at U.S. border agents, a union spokesman said.

The U.S. Border Patrol said in a statement that a Mexican law enforcement chopper crossed about 100 yards north into the Arizona desert. The helicopter then fired two shots on the Tohono O'Odham Indian Nation, which sits on the border. Shawn Moran, a spokesman for the border patrol union, said the Mexicans fired at agents but that none were hurt.

Sebastin Galvn, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Tucson, said the office was gathering information but did not have any details yet.

This incident was not the first one in which the Mexican military has veered across the international boundary.

In January, U.S. border agents confronted two heavily armed Mexican soldiers who crossed 50 yards inside Arizona, the Los Angeles Times reported. A standoff ensued, but nobody was hurt.

In 2011, more than 30 uniformed Mexican soldiers in military vehicles crossed the Rio Grande without authorization in an incident that was believed to be inadvertent.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Talk about a cosmic caffeine jolt. The International Space Station is getting a real Italian espresso machine.

Astronauts of all nationalities — but especially the Italians — have long grumbled about the tepid instant coffee served in pouches and drunk with straws 260 miles above Earth. The pouches and straws aren't going away, but at least the brew will pack some zero-gravity punch.

The specially-designed-for-space espresso machine is dubbed ISSpresso — ISS for International Space Station.

Its launch early next year from Wallops Island, Virginia, is timed to coincide with the six-month mission of Italy's first female astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti. The 37-year-old fighter pilot and Italian Air Force captain will fly to the space station in November aboard a Russian capsule.

She'll be the first out-of-this-world barista.

"How cool is that?" she said in a tweet earlier this month. "I'll get to operate the first space espresso machine!"

Italy's century-old coffee maestro Lavazza teamed up with a Turin-based engineering company, Argotec, and the Italian Space Agency to improve coffee conditions aboard the orbiting outpost.

Besides espresso, ISSpresso is capable of whipping up tea and consomm.

What more could an astronaut want?

During his 5-month stay on the space station last year, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano repeatedly talked about missing espresso. (This is the cool-as-ice test pilot who nearly drowned during a spacewalk last July when his helmet filled with water from his suit's cooling system.)

Argotec already was working on a space espresso machine. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia will make the delivery on its Cygnus cargo ship; the launch is targeted for January.

NASA's coffee-loving astronaut Donald Pettit actually offered some ideas for ISSpresso during its design phase. He's a two-time space station resident who invented and even patented a zero-gravity cup for sipping his orbital joe versus sucking it with a straw.

No question, an espresso machine will be "a welcome addition" to space station life, Pettit said Wednesday from Johnson Space Center in Houston. The pre-measured bags of freeze-dried coffee served in orbit taste good — when you're up there on the frontier, he said. On Earth, any coffee lover would go "Yeeck."

Argotec spokesman Antonio Pilello has sampled the ISSpresso espresso and gives it a thumbs-up. The space machine is designed to operate at the same temperature and pressure as Earthly espresso makers, according to the company, to guarantee taste and flavor.

"You know, coffee is very important for Italian people. We are really hard to please about it!" Pilello wrote in an email.

Certified for safety and approved by NASA, ISSpresso initially will fly with 20 coffee capsules. Extra packets will follow for the six-member crew, if the trial run goes well. The 44-pound machine — a compact 14 inches by 17 inches — will be housed in the U.S. laboratory, Destiny. It resembles a microwave oven, with all the action occurring inside.

Engineers replaced the typical plastic tubing in an espresso machine with steel for robustness. They also used buttons and switches similar to those already on the space station, so the astronauts would be familiar with the design.

Astronaut Pettit points out that the lack of gravity will prevent the bubbly foam from rising to the top. Yet even if the space espresso falls short by connoisseur standards, "it would be the best coffee that we've ever had in space."

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Online:

NASA: http://tinyurl.com/nasaspacestation