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SCORES OF SCHOOLGIRLS kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Islamic extremist abductors, a civic organisation has reported.
At the same time, the Boko Haram terrorist network is negotiating over the students’ fate and is demanding an unspecified ransom for their release, according to a community leader.
He said the Wednesday night message from the abductors also claimed that two of the girls have died from snake bites.
The message was sent to a member of a presidential committee mandated last year to mediate a ceasefire with the Islamic extremists, said the civic leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak about the talks.
The news of negotiations comes as parents say the girls are being sold into marriage to Boko Haram militants. The students are being paid 2,000 naira (€10) to marry the fighters, Halite Aliyu of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum told The Associated Press.
‘Medieval kind of slavery’
She said the parents’ information about mass weddings is coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram is known to have hideouts.
“The latest reports are that they have been taken across the borders, some to Cameroon and Chad,” Aliyu said. It was not possible to verify the reports about more than 200 missing girls kidnapped in the northeast by the Boko Haram terrorist network two weeks ago.
“Some of them have been married off to insurgents. A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off,” community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok, the town where the girls were abducted, told the BBC Hausa Service.
Protests
Outrage over the failure to rescue the girls is growing and hundreds of women braved heavy rain to march today to Nigeria’s National Assembly to protest lack of action over the students. Hundreds more also marched in Kano, Nigeria’s second city in the north.
“The leaders of both houses said they will do all in their power but we are saying two weeks already have past, we want action now,” said activist Mercy Asu Abang.
We want our girls to come home alive — not in body bags.
Nigerians have harnessed social media to protest, trending under the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.
A federal senator from the region said the military is aware of the movements of the kidnappers and the girls because he has been feeding them details that he has gathered on a near-daily basis.
“Whatever it takes”
Zanna said some of the girls are in Kolofata in Cameroon, about 15 kilometres from the border with Nigeria. He said one of the insurgents had called a friend in Borno state to say that he had just got married and was settling in Kolofata. Zanna also said three or four days ago Nigerian herdsmen reported seeing the girls taken in boats onto an island in Lake Chad.
Another senator from the region said the government needs to get international help to rescue the girls. The government must do “whatever it takes, even seeking external support to make sure these girls are released,” Senator Ali Ndume said.
The longer it takes the dimmer the chances of finding them, the longer it takes the more traumatised the family and the abducted girls are.
About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from their captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remain missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.
Criticism
The failure to rescue the girls is a massive embarrassment to Nigeria’s government and the military, already confronted by mounting criticism over its apparent inability to curb the 5-year-old Islamic uprising despite having draconian powers through an 11-month state of emergency in three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the country.
The military trumpets a success in its “onslaught on terrorists” but then the extremists step up the tempo and deadliness of their attacks. More than 1,500 people have been killed in the insurgency so far this year, compared to an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.
President Goodluck Jonathan, who is from the predominantly Christian south of Nigeria, has been accused of insensitivity to the plight of people in the north, who are mainly Muslims.
The military’s lack of progress in rescuing the girls indicates that large parts of northeastern Nigeria remain beyond the control of the government. Until the kidnappings, the air force had been mounting near-daily bombing raids since mid-January on the Sambisa Forest and mountain caves bordering Chad.
Aliyu said that in northeastern Nigeria “life has become nasty, short and brutish. We are living in a state of anarchy.”
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Fantastic, welcome to Ireland. Hopefully settling into a new school routine will be. Welcome distraction from trauma and displacement.
Times will be tough for the next year for us, but remember it pales in comparison to what Ukrainians are going through. We will take the hit and recover.
Welcome to Ireland to every Ukrainian who makes their way to our shores.
This is all down to local school principals, teachers, SNAs, secretaries, caretakers and all the wider school community. Irish schools are stepping up and they are doing this with NO extra resources. There’s nothing extra – no extra staff (English as Additional Lang Teacher/SEN Teacher/SNA etc) educational resources or funding so do not let the DES pretend that there is a “suite of measures” in place to support these vulnerable people.
@Stephen Murphy: Vladimir is that you?
@Stephen Murphy: — Is this another new fake Stephen Murphy account? You need to Putin more work to make it look genuine.
@Stephen Murphy: First, I agree that neo-Nazis are reprehensible and should be opposed, but that said they are a small minority and they are on both sides of the conflict.
For example, here’s the recent funeral of Volodymyr Zhoga:
https://twitter.com/KyleJGlen/status/1500778374431711234
… former the leader of the pro-Russian neo-Nazi Sparta Battalion of the Donetsk People’s Republic. A few other neo-Nazi pro-Russian militant groups active or previously active the DPR include The National Bolsheviks, RNU Volunteer Units, and the ‘Rusich’, ‘Svarozhich’ and ‘Ratibor’ battalions, which had Slavic swastikas on their badges.
Pro-Russian neo-Nazis arrested for war crimes in Ukraine include Alexei Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky.
On the Ukraine side there’s Azov, with 900 – 1200 fighters out of the 150,000 – 200,000 strong Ukrainian army (<1%).
Also, Russia has more far right or neo-Nazi members of parliament (Douma) than in Ukraine's Parliament (Rada), 22 v's 1 MPs. Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has 21 seats in the Douma (7.6% of the vote in 2020 elections) and the Rodinia party has 1 seat.
The head of the Russian space program, Roscosmos, and former vice Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Rogozin, is the co-founder and former leader of the far right Rodnia party (1 seat in the Russian Parliament). Here he is at a party rally in 2008, where members gave Hitler salutes at the end of his speech:
https://youtu.be/aI0eEH_ZuHE?t=86
On the other hand in Ukraine, Svoboda won only 1 seat in the 450 seat Ukrainian Parliament (2.5% of the vote). Right Sector got 0 seats.
Also, Volodymyr Zelensky got 73.22% of the vote in the 2019 elections and he did better in Russian-speaking east, than the pro-EU/NATO far West, because a proportion of young ethic Russians voted for him because he is anti-corruption.
@David Jordan: the Ukrainian state has honoured a Nazi collaborator responsible for 100s of thousands of Jews and others. Statues ?
A national day of commemoration?
Banning books condemning him?
What part of this is worthy of ignoring?
There’s a reason why Israel is sitting on the fence.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-celebrates-nazi-collaborator-bans-book-critical-of-pogroms-leader/amp/
@David Jordan: and unfortunate it’s not a small minority – 40 to 50% of western Ukrainians look upon him favourably or v favourably.
@Stephen Murphy: the same can be said for all former eastern block countries. joining the EU will not knock that eastern block mentality out of them over night, Poland & Hungary are good examples of this.
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