The international community is coming together in support of the recently kidnapped Nigerian girls, but the situation remains dire.
It has been over two weeks now since about two hundred school girls were abducted from their school in Nigeria, and there has still been no progress on returning them to their families. People are getting desperate, calling on the President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan to act, but there are fears that Boko Haram, the group responsible for the kidnapping, may harm the girls if an unsuccessful rescue attempt is launched.
Official government reports claim 129 girls are still missing, although the exact number has been challenged because school records were destroyed during the attack. Others believe over 200 are still missing. Experts believe that some of the girls may have escaped their captors and returned to their families secretly, and they do not want to draw attention to themselves by announcing it.
Although there is growing international pressure on the Nigerian government to find and rescue the girls, there is no actual certainty as to where the girls are being held. It has been suggested that many of them are close to the Cameroonian border and could even have left Nigeria completely. This limits the Nigerian government’s ability to act, and forces the international community to recognize that the seriousness of the situation has now become multi-national.
However, America has offered some of its finest intelligence officials to aid in the attempts to locate the kidnapped Nigerian girls. John Kerry has stated that there is a great amount of concern over the missing girls. Some of the skills that the offered officials have include hostage negotiations.
Boko Haram has attacked a school before, but in that case all of the male students were slaughtered, and the female students ordered to return home and marry. Some consider this latest attack to be retribution for ‘ignoring’ their command. Boko Haram broadly translates to ‘Western education is sinful’, which explains why they continuously target places of study. The leader of Boko Haram has stated on a recent video that they will ‘sell’ the girls. This may be to men as wives, or into sexual slavery.