Nigerian troops have found two former schoolgirls who were taken by Boko Haram militants eight years ago, the military said on Tuesday, freeing some of the last people from the 2014 Chibok abductions.
The two women each carried babies on their laps as they were presented by the military, after captivity with militants who stormed their school in April 2014 in northeast Nigeria in a mass kidnapping.
Major General Christopher Musa, the military commander of troops in the region, told reporters that the women were found on June 12 and Tuesday last week in separate locations by troops.
Photo: AFP
“We are very lucky to have been able to recover two of the Chibok girls,” Musa said.
Dozens of Boko Haram militants stormed the Chibok girls’ boarding school in 2014 and packed 276 pupils into trucks in the militant group’s first mass school abduction.
Fifty-seven of the girls escaped by jumping from the trucks shortly after their abduction, while 80 were released in exchange for some detained Boko Haram commanders following negotiations with the Nigerian government.
In the recent releases, one of the women, Hauwa Joseph, was found along with other civilians on June 12 near Bama after troops dislodged a Boko Haram camp, while the other, Mary Dauda, was found later outside Ngoshe village in Gwoza District, near the border with Cameroon.
On Wednesday last week, the military wrote on Twitter that it had found one of the Chibok girls named Mary Ngoshe.
She turned out to be Mary Dauda.
“I was nine when we were kidnapped from our school in Chibok and I was married off not long ago and had this child,” Joseph told reporters at the military headquarters.
Joseph’s husband and father-in-law were killed in a military raid and she was left to fend for herself and her 14-month-old son.
“We were abandoned, no one cared to look after us. We were not being fed,” she said.
Thousands of Boko Haram fighters and families have been surrendering over the past year, fleeing government bombardments and infighting with rival group Islamic State West Africa Province.
The conflict has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced 2.2 million more since 2009.
Dauda, who was 18 when she was kidnapped, was married at different times to Boko Haram fighters in the group’s enclave in the Sambisa forest.
“They would starve and beat you if you refused to pray,” Dauda said about life under Boko Haram.
She fled and told her husband that she was visiting another Chibok girl in Dutse village near Ngoshe.
With the help of an old man who lived outside the village with his family, Dauda trekked all night to Ngoshe where she surrendered to troops in the morning.
“All the remaining Chibok girls have been married with children. I left more than 20 of them in Sambisa,” she said. “I’m so happy I’m back.”
After the Chibok school mass abduction, militants carried out several mass abductions and deadly attacks on schools in the northeast.
In 2018, Islamic State West Africa Province fighters kidnapped 110 schoolgirls aged 11 to 19 from Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi in Yobe State.
All of the girls were released a month later, except Leah Sharibu, the only Christian among the girls, who was held by the group for refusing to renounce her faith.
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