On the night of April 14th, 300 Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted, in which 53 later escaped, by a leader of a militant Islamist group who didn’t claim credit for the abduction until Monday.
At about 11 p.m. on April 14, a local government official, Baa Lawal, revcieved a warning via cell phone; He was told that about 200 heavily armed militants in 20 pick up trucks and more than 30 motocycles were headed toward his town.
Lawal alerted the 1 soldiers guarding Chibok, he said. Then he roused sleeping residents and told them to flee into the bush and the nearby hills. The soldiers send an SOS to the nearest barracks, about 30 miles awaymm an hours drive on a first road.
No help arrived.
When the militants showed up two hours after the warning, the soldiers fought caliantly, Lawal said. Although they were outnumbered and outgunned, they held off the insurgents for an hour and a half, desperately waiting for their 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 night of the inncident the girls in the school dorm could hear the sound of gunshots from a nearby town; so when armed men in uniforms burst in and promised to rescue them they were relieved.. At first. That was until they set the room on fire and started chanting. The girls knew immediately that they were not indeed officers, but that they were members of the ruthless Islamic extremist group called “Boko Haram” which means Western Education is sinful.
There were too many gunmen that even after the students realized the men were Islamic extremists, they obediently sat in the dirt. The men set the school ablaze and herded the girls group onto the backs of three pickup trucks. The trucks drove through three villages, but then the car of fighters follwing them broke down.
They are an escalating Islmanic extremist insurrection that has killed more than 1,500 so far this year. They kidnapped the group of girls and drove them away in pickup trucks into the dense forest.
Three weeks later, 276 girls are still missing, at least two have died from being bitten by snakes, and about 20 are ill, according to an intermediary who is in touch with their captors.
Some of the kidnapped girls have been forced into “marriage” with their Boko Haram abductors, sold for a nominal bride price of $12, according to parents who talked with villagers. Other have been taken across borders to Cameroon and Chad, they said.
Personally I couldnt ever imagine myself in the position of some of these poor girls. Theyre remaining strong, and so are their families.
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