generalspeaking

Friday, May 01, 2015

Nigeria's Shame

"The processing is continuing; it involves a lot of things because most of them [rescued Nigerian village girls and women] are traumatized and you have got to put them in a psychological frame of mind to extract information from them."
"Sambisa Forest is a large expanse of land, so what we were able to get is four out of several terrorist camps in the forest."
Col. Sani Usman, Nigerian Armed Forces

In this file photo taken Wednesday, April 8, 2015, Nigerian Soldiers man a check point in Gwoza, Nigeria, a town newly liberated from Boko Haram. Nigeria's military says it is moving 200 girls and 93 women from a northeastern forest where they were rescued from Boko Haram extremists. (AP Photo/Lekan Oyekanmi,File)

There is a new president of Nigeria, one who promised to take a hard line with the terrorist group Boko Haram that has pledged its allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. That may be one reason that the Nigerian military is at last rousing itself out of its disinterested lethargy on display when it did nothing to rescue any of the countless Nigerian girls and women taken in mass kidnappings like the 219 missing from their boarding school in Chibok, a year ago.

Amnesty International claims that at least two thousand women and girls have been abducted since the beginning of 2014, many of them forced into sexual slavery, and also trained to fight for the Islamist terrorists. An intelligence officer described that many among the women and girls rescued in recent days, used weapons against the Nigerian army. As they were trained to do by Boko Haram, which used them both as human shields and as first-line defenders, armed and trained.

Military MASS RESCUE of 200 girls and 93 women from Boko Haram

allenwestrepublic.com

By later accounts, the soldiers subdued the women firing at them, removed their weapons and rounded them up for rescue, while other troops destroyed four Boko Haram camps. The army that had laconically stood by as Boko Haram marauded the countryside, indulging in mass killing and looting and taking over towns, in northeastern Borno State for their Islamist caliphate, is now asserting itself as an armed force dedicated to defending the interests of their country and its citizens.

It's been a month since the Nigerian military began their air raids in the Sambisa Forest, representing an assault it had earlier said it had avoided in fear of killing kidnapped women and girls, or inciting their captors to kill them in revenge for the onslaughts. Now the military claims it has driven the jihadists out of all the towns they captured, albeit with considerable assistance from Chadian and Niger troops. Cameroonian soldiers have guarded their borders in prevention of Boko Haram fighters escaping.

The rescued girls and women are being evacuated, with plans afoot to evaluate their psychological and physical well-being. Disappointingly, none of the Chibok schoolgirls appear to be among those whom the military has rescued.