U.S. joins Nigerian hunt for abducted girls

A woman cries Tuesday during a demonstration outside defense headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, calling for the government to rescue teenage schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram.
A woman cries Tuesday during a demonstration outside defense headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, calling for the government to rescue teenage schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Tuesday that the U.S. will do everything it can to help Nigeria find nearly 300 teenage girls who have been missing since they were abducted from school three weeks ago by an Islamist extremist group that has threatened to sell them.

Finding the girls is the immediate priority, Obama said, and dealing with the Boko Haram group is a close second.

"In the short term our goal is obviously is to help the international community, and the Nigerian government, as a team to do everything we can to recover these young ladies," Obama said in an interview with Al Roker of NBC's Today program. "But we're also going to have to deal with the broader problem of organizations like this that ... can cause such havoc in people's day-to-day lives."

Obama said the Nigerian government has accepted technical assistance from U.S. military and law enforcement officials.

"We're going to do everything we can to provide assistance to them," the president said.

Gunmen on April 15 raided dormitories in an all-girls secondary school in remote Chibok in the northeastern state of Borno, and drove off in trucks with more than 200 students. The Boko Haram Islamist group said it had taken the girls captive because they were being educated instead of getting married.

Obama said the abduction, which has ignited international anger and mounting demands for Nigeria to do more to find and free the girls before they are harmed, is a "terrible situation."

"Boko Haram, this terrorist organization that's been operating in Nigeria, has been killing people and innocent civilians for a very long time," Obama said, noting that the group long has been identified as one of the worst local or regional terrorist organizations in the world. "I can only imagine what the parents are going through," added Obama, a father of two daughters ages 15 and 12.

The technical experts, including a team to be put together by the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, will include U.S. military and law enforcement personnel skilled in intelligence, investigations, hostage negotiating, information sharing and victim assistance, as well as officials with expertise in other areas, White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

The U.S. was not considering sending armed forces, Carney noted.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. has been in touch with Nigeria "from Day One" of the crisis. But repeated offers of U.S. assistance were ignored until Kerry and Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan spoke Tuesday amid growing international concern over the fate of the girls in the weeks since their abduction from their school in the country's remote northeast.

About 275,000 people signed an online petition demanding the government do more to rescue the girls, and there have been rallies seeking their release in cities including New York and Washington as well as Abuja and Lagos, Nigeria's commercial hub.

Kerry said Nigeria apparently had its own strategy for how to proceed but realizes that more needs to be done.

"I think now the complications that have arisen have convinced everybody that there needs to be a greater effort," Kerry said at a State Department news conference. "And it will begin immediately. I mean, literally, immediately."

A statement from Jonathan's office said the U.S. offer "includes the deployment of U.S. security personnel and assets to work with their Nigerian counterparts in the search and rescue operation." The statement added that Nigeria's security agencies are working at "full capacity" to find the girls and would appreciate the addition of American "counter-insurgency know-how and expertise."

Nigeria's police have said more than 300 girls were abducted. Of that number, 276 remain in captivity and 53 escaped.

Nigeria's Islamic extremist leader, Abubakar Shekau, has threatened to sell the girls. Shekau also claimed responsibility for the abduction and warned that his group, Boko Haram, will attack more schools and abduct more girls. The group's name means "Western education is sinful."

"We would also give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves," Shekau said in a video released Monday.

The United Nations Children's Fund and a local official said Tuesday that extremists carried out another kidnapping in the country's north.

UNICEF said the second kidnapping involved at least eight girls who were seized in their homes in Borno state to prevent them from attending school. It called the latest abduction "an outrage and a worsening nightmare for the girls themselves, and for the families of the more than 200 girls who have been stolen from their communities in the last several weeks."

Manuel Fontaine, the agency's regional director for west and central Africa, said the information was obtained from the agency's contacts for the area.

Hamba Tada, a local official in Gwoza, another town in the area, offered further confirmation and additional details of the latest kidnapping although his account differed in some respects.

Tada said 11 girls, 12 to 15 years old, had been abducted from two villages, Warabe and Wala, on Sunday night by members of Boko Haram. He said the kidnappers, armed with AK-47 rifles, had not shot anyone but seized grain and livestock from the villagers "while the abducted girls were hurled into an 18-seater bus before they fled."

"The gunmen only warned the villagers against alerting any security personnel on the abduction of girls," Tada said. "They promised to deal with anyone that violates their order."

The accounts contradicted the police commissioner in Borno state, Lawan Tanko, who denied there had been any new abductions.

Boko Haram has been waging a violent campaign to impose Islamic law in Africa's biggest oil producer. The five-year insurgency has claimed more than 4,000 lives and forced almost half a million people to flee their homes, according to the International Crisis Group.

The kidnappings, along with bomb attacks in Abuja that killed more than 90 people in the past month, have raised security concerns as Nigeria prepares to host the World Economic Forum on Africa, which starts in Abuja today.

The State Department on Tuesday warned U.S. citizens against traveling to Nigeria.

Details of attack

Meanwhile some of the more than 50 girls who escaped after the April kidnapping spoke about the ordeal Tuesday, along with Nigerian government and Borno state officials, school officials, six relatives of the missing girls, civil-society leaders and politicians in northeast Nigeria and soldiers in the war zone.

Many spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing that giving their names would also reveal the girls' identities and subject them to possible stigmatization.

The Chibok girls school is in the remote and sparsely populated northeast region of Nigeria, a country of 170 million with a growing chasm between a north dominated by Muslims and a south by Christians. Like all schools in Borno state, Chibok, an elite academy of both Muslim and Christian girls, had been closed because of increasingly deadly attacks by Boko Haram. But it had reopened to allow final-year students to take exams.

At about 11 p.m. on April 14, a local government official, Bana Lawal, received a warning by cellphone. He was told that about 200 heavily armed militants in 20 pickups and more than 30 motorcycles were headed toward his town.

Lawal alerted the 15 soldiers guarding Chibok, he said. Then he roused sleeping residents and told them to flee into the bush and the nearby hills. The soldiers sent an SOS to the nearest barracks, about 30 miles away, an hour's drive on a dirt road.

No help arrived.

When the militants showed up two hours after the warning, the soldiers fought valiantly, Lawal said. Although they were outnumbered and outgunned, they held off the insurgents for an hour and a half, desperately waiting for reinforcements. One was killed. They ran out of ammunition and fled for their lives.

As dawn approached, the extremists headed for the boarding school.

The girls in the school dorm said they heard the sound of gunshots from a nearby town. So when armed men in uniforms burst in and promised to rescue them, at first they were relieved.

"Don't worry, we're soldiers," one 16-year-old girl recalls them saying. "Nothing is going to happen to you."

The gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School to gather outside. The men went into a storeroom and removed all the food. Then they set fire to the room.

"They ... started shouting, 'Allahu Akhbar,'" or God is great, the 16-year-old student said. "And we knew."

The extremists set the school ablaze and kidnapped the entire group of girls, driving them away in pickups into the dense forest.

The trucks drove through three villages, but then the car of fighters following them broke down. That's when some of the girls jumped out.

Others argued, the 16-year-old remembered. But one student said, "We should go! Me, I am coming down. They can shoot me if they want, but I don't know what they are going to do with me otherwise."

As they jumped, the car behind started up. Its lights came on. The girls did not know whether the fighters could see them, so they ran into the bush and hid.

A few other girls clung to low-hanging branches and waited until the vehicles had passed. Then they met up in the bush and made their way back to the road. A man on a bicycle came across them and accompanied them back home.

The military said it is diligently searching for the girls, with extensive aerial surveillance. But many soldiers said they are demoralized, because Boko Haram is more heavily armed and better equipped, while they get little more than a meal a day.

In the meantime, the parents are frantic. Through sobs and jagged gasps for air, the mother of a missing 15-year-old said she had lost confidence in the authorities.

"I am so very sad because the government of Nigeria did not take care of our children and does not now care about our children," said the mother, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her daughter. "All we have left is to pray to God to help them and help us."

Information for this article was contributed by Darlene Superville and Michelle Faul of The Associated Press; by Gbenga Akingbule, Daniel Magnowski and Elisha Bala-Gbogbo of Bloomberg News; and by Adam Nossiter, Rick Gladstone and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.

A Section on 05/07/2014

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