The
American officials said that the joint forces of the USA and African countries
have found the whereabouts of the clusters of the Chibok schoolgirls abducted
by the Boko Haram sect two years ago. However, the rescue operations have not
been carried out because of fears that any succeeding battle with the
insurgents would put the hostages at risk, or provoke some form of revenge
against captives still being held in other areas. According to the officials, a
combination of local intelligence, intercepted communications and drone footage
had been used to find groups of the girls this month.
At the same time, they claimed that efforts to free the girls have not been
left. The officials said that a key concern is the hundreds of other women and
girls who are also held by Boko Haram, captives who are often raped, forced
into marriages with their abductors, and sometimes killed. The retired head of
the United States military Africa Command Gen. Carter F. Ham said: “You’re not
just looking for 200 girls. There are many, many others who have been taken
hostage, and more thousands killed, and two and a half million people
displaced.” The intelligence reports show that the girls have been separated
into smaller groups. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the head of the military’s Africa
Command, added that the Chibok girls have been “moved to some very isolated
places.” He continued that locating them is “not an exact science.”
“So the
challenge is, how do you find lots of people held hostage in different places?
That’s really complex and it stretches the capability of local forces,” General
Ham added. About 200 American drone operators worked with local troops to
collect intelligence on Boko Haram and the location of its many captives. In
the related development, there are reports that the insurgents are increasingly
using its captives as suicide attackers. Col. Badjeck Didier, a spokesperson
for Cameroon’s Defence Ministry, said recently that he worried that some of the
Chibok girls may have become suicide bombers. He said: “When we see the
kamikaze bombers, they have the same age — 14-15 years — as the Chibok girls. A
recent video released by Boko Haram that purported to show proof of life of a
number of the Chibok girls — something the Nigerian government had demanded as
a condition of negotiations — was a sign that the group wants to negotiate.”
“These
women did not chose to become suicide bombers, but after two years of
incarceration and bearing children of these men, some of them had to buy in out
of personal survival,” Sanderson said. “I do think that Boko Haram has considered
using these girls to kill their rescuers. And that would cause people to have
spasms over what that symbolism meant,” added Tom M. Sanderson, director of the
transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. On her own part, Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the
United Nations said that the Special Operations forces sent by President Obama
were doing “surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance” and would continue
their efforts to locate the Chibok girls. Click Here to Download Our Android App
