“This is an anniversary that none of us thought that we would have to mark, because we thought by now we would have found the Chibok girls, and they would have been returned to their homes, to their parents, and we would just be fighting Boko Haram”, said Wilson, a Florida Democrat.
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“I am speaking on 25 December 2015, on behalf of the all the Chibok girls and we are all well”, Naomi Zakaria, one of the missing girls, says to the camera.
Released two years after the abduction of over 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, the report, Beyond Chibok, shows alarming trends in four countries affected by Boko Haram over the past two years.
Boko Haram militants abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok on April 14, 2014, with 57 students managing to escape but 219 still missing despite a global campaign #bringbackourgirls involving celebrities and USA first lady Michelle Obama.
The United Nations Children’s Fund thinks 2.3 million people have been displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, with 1.3 million of them children.
A schoolmate says she cried with joy when she saw the video appearing to show some of the kidnapped Chibok girls. Thanks for your coverage tonight, Bruce. A video recently was released that showed 15 of the girls, with one saying, “we are all well”, and applying an emphasis on the word “all”. “He is seeing me through and he will see me through”, she said, visibly holding back tears.
Boko Haram roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden”, and the kidnapping at Chibok is far from the only crimes the ISIL-affiliated group committed. World leaders met in Paris a month after the girls were kidnapped to rally worldwide resources to defeat Boko Haram.
“The now haphazard approach to the rehabilitation of rescued captives has left majority psychologically, socially and culturally vulnerable”, they added in an article published on blog.crisisgroup.org. Abubakar Shekan the head of Boko Haram said they would be released in exchange for prisoners.
“Seeing them gives me the courage to tell the world today that we should not lose hope”, Saa said. They also asked for the Nigerian government to cooperate with Boko Haram.
“The girls were looking very, very well”, Galang said in a telephone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation after viewing the video at a screening organized by local officials in Maiduguri, capital of Borno state in northeast Nigeria. They identify themselves as among the 276 girls taken by Boko Haram militants in April 2014. She joined other relatives of the missing girls in Abuja on the second anniversary of the abduction to watch the first video released by Boko Haram since 2014.
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Saa, who now attends college in the US and is not using her real name to protect her family back in Nigeria, spoke in front of members of Congress who are calling for more USA action, Michele reports.
