Nigerian extremist group Boko-Haram has returned the more than one hundred school girls who they kidnapped in late February. The girls were returned to the Nigerian town of Dapchi Wednesday morning — five of the schoolgirls have been confirmed dead.
The return of the girls comes a week after Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari visited the school that the girls attended to assure families that the girls would make it home safe. According to reports, just last week the Nigerian Defense Minister said that the girls would be rescued within a week’s time. Instead, the girls were returned by unarmed Boko-Haram subscribers, rather than rescued by the Nigerian military.
Through an investigation by Amnesty International, it was revealed that Nigerian security forces “failed to act on advanced warnings” of the imminent kidnapping.
“The military failed to respond while Boko Haram conducted an armed raid on the Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe state, on 19 February in an assault with chilling echoes of the infamous Chibok girls’ abduction of 2014,” the report reads.
Many remember the extremist group, Boko-Haram from the 2014 kidnapping of roughly 276 Chibok schoolgirls– an incident that gained the attention of the world sparking the First Lady Michelle Obama led hashtag Bring Back Our Girls.
Of the more than 250 Chibok girls kidnapped, 106 were returned including 80 who were returned as recent as May of last year. The 2014 kidnapping is said to be a response to the extremist groups views against the Western education that the girls at the school in Chibok were receiving. The school girls were said to have been attending a school that was predominantly Christian.
Boko-Haram, an extremist organization that subscribes to the Islam religion, has been terrorizing Northern Africa for years now. The extremist group is responsible for the death of more than 20,000 people, and has displaced more than 2 million people according to Reuters. In April 2017, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedoms or USCRIF recommended that the State Department include Nigeria as a country of particular concern in regard to religious freedom.
