Nigeria’s military is continuing with operations against Boko Haram, despite the militants offering to return the kidnapped Chibok girls in a prisoner swap, the country’s chief of defense staff has said. Observers say the division shows that the group is weakening, and the video might be a way for Boko Haram’s original leader Abubakar Shekau to try to reassert his power.
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On Sunday, Ahmed Saldika, a Nigerian journalist with Boko Haram contacts posted the video on Twitter.
The Nigerian government has said it is still “in touch” with the organization and is “working for the girls’ release”, the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture said on its Facebook page, according to CNN.
Salkida has over the past two years, written extensively about the Boko Haram sect.
A Boko Haram fighter who spoke in the video said some of the girls had been killed by military airstrikes, while some were either seriously wounded or married off.
A new video released Sunday by West African extremist organization Boko Haram appears to show that some of the girls it infamously abducted from the Nigerian town of Chibok in 2014 are still alive.
While President Muhammadu Buhari has said the group is “technically defeated”, his government has struggled to find the girls, an enduring political embarrassment that highlights Boko Haram’s continued presence in the region.
Boko Haram recently split into two factions, one of which claims to be the true regional branch of the Islamic State militant group.
Dozens of the kidnapped school girls made famous by the hashtag campaign #BringBackOurGirls in 2014 have been killed in airstrikes, according to a video released by the girl’s captors.
“When I heard her voice, I realised she is my daughter”, her father Kanu Yakubu told reporters in Abuja.
One of the kidnapped girls was found alive in the Sambisa Forest in northeastern Nigeria in May. “You have been going around saying, ‘Bring Back Our Girls, ‘” he says with a taunting smile.
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This request sparked up the call by the BringBackOurGirls group and the parents of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls who pleaded with the government to heed to the demands of the terrorists.
