Nigeria: Rescued Boko Haram girls ‘traumatised’

Nigerian soldiers man a checkpoint in a liberated town. Picture: AP

Colonel Sani Usman said many are traumatised and the military is flying in medical and intelligence teams to examine them.

He added yesterday that it remained to be seen if any were among the 219 who are still missing more than a year after being snatched from a boarding school in Chibok, a town in north-east Nigeria, in a mass kidnapping that outraged much of the world.

The evacuation from the Sambisa Forest in north-east Nigeria began yesterday but Col Usman would not say where the rescued females are being taken. He added that they needed to be questioned to determine their identities.

“The processing is continuing, it involves a lot of things because most of them are traumatised and you have got to put them in a psychological frame of mind to extract information from them,” Col Usman said.

While the Chibok kidnapping on 14 April 2014 made the extremist group Boko Haram known to much of the world, the group has been steadily kidnapping females.

Amnesty International said this month that at least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since the start of 2014 and many have been forced into sexual slavery and trained to fight.

Of the women and girls who were rescued in recent days, an intelligence officer and a soldier said Boko Haram used some of them as armed human shields, a first line of defence that fired at troops. But the soldiers managed to subdue them and round them up, they added.

Col Usman said military operations continue in the forest where the women and girls were rescued, while troops destroyed four Boko Haram camps.

“Sambisa Forest is a large expanse of land, so what we were able to get is four out of several terrorist camps in the forest,” he said of the area that sprawls over 23,170 square miles.

Nigeria’s military largely stood by last year as Boko Haram took over dozens of towns and declared a large swathe of north-eastern Borno state an Islamic caliphate.

That changed when a multinational offensive led by Chad began at the end of January.

Now, Nigeria’s military says it has driven the Islamic extremists out of towns with help from troops from Chad and Niger, while Cameroonian soldiers are guarding their borders to prevent the militants escaping.