Boko Haram abduct another 60 women and girls

[Donal Cozzie]

SUSPECTED BOKO HARAM militants have abducted more than 60 women and girls, some as young as three, in the latest kidnappings in northeast Nigeria — and over two months since more than 200 schoolgirls were seized.

Analysts said the kidnapping, which happened during a raid on Kummabza village in the Damboa district of Borno state, could be an attempt by the Islamist group to refocus attention on its demands for the release of militant fighters.

Boko Haram has indicated that it would be willing to release the 219 schoolgirls that it has held hostage since April 14 in exchange for the freedom of its brothers in arms currently held in Nigerian jails.

Nigeria initially refused to sanction any deal but efforts have since been made to open talks with the group, with a possible prisoner swap part of discussions.
The military in Abuja said in a tweet late on Monday it could not confirm the latest abductions and spokesmen were not immediately available for comment when contacted by AFP on today.
But a senior officer in the Damboa local government, who asked for his name to be withheld as he was not authorised to speak on the matter, said: “Over 60 women were hijacked and forcefully taken away by the terrorists.
“The village was also destroyed,” he said, adding that locals had fled their homes to other parts of Borno and across the state border into Adamawa.
“Among those abducted are children between the ages of three and 12,” he added.

Aji Khalil, a local vigilante leader, said: “Over 60 women were abducted by Boko Haram terrorists. They were forcefully taken away by Boko Haram terrorists.
Four villagers who tried to escape were shot dead on the spot.
Damboa local government officials said they were afraid to speak out because of the controversy surrounding the Chibok abductions, with Nigeria’s government coming under heavy criticism for its slow response.

Another resident, who fled to the Borno state capital Maiduguri and also requested anonymity, said that more than 30 men were killed during the raid, which began last Thursday.
“The attackers held the whole village hostage for the next three days,” he added.
News of the abductions came as locals in three villages of the Askira Uba district, some 60 kilometres to the south, said they had been attacked over the weekend.
Resident Emos Ali said “many” people had died, although no official toll was available.
A bomb blast blamed on Boko Haram killed at least eight at a public health college in the northern city of Kano on Monday.
The newly appointed religious leader the Emir of Kano, former central bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, said the attack had “traumatised every one of us” after visiting the wounded in hospital.
“We pray to Allah to bring an end to this security situation and may Allah not allow a repeat of this,” he said in his first comments on Boko Haram violence since his appointment.


This group need to be exterminated. What a group of sick,mindless,evil moronic people.... Truly disgusting

 

[Donal Cozzie]

I've just read some on another source that 31 young males were also kidnapped.

 

[mithun_minhas]

What happened to the original 200 girls? Have they all returned? I did not follow the news on it.

 

[Raju Rocket]

What happened to the original 200 girls? Have they all returned? I did not follow the news on it.

Boko Haram wants to trade the girls for prisoners with the Nigerian Govt. Their initial plan to sell the girls into sex trade will no longer be carried out, as the Boko Haram spokesman in the video says; since the girls have converted to Islam.

[utube]r5sQUswN-cI[/utube]

 

[Gabbar Singh]

Several months on 276 of the almost 300 girls remain in captivity. So much for the promises of various world leaders who said they would help rescue them.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

[mithun_minhas]

Several months on 276 of the almost 300 girls remain in captivity. So much for the promises of various world leaders who said they would help rescue them.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Its Africa. So nobody cares about those girls.

 

[Fastandfurious]

What are these people doing?! So retarded.

 

[AlCapone]

These extremists need to be exterminated but there's something really sketchy about them(like ISIS), it's more than just radicalism or religion, they're pawns in some sinister geo-political game, most of us are too naive to understand it.

 

[OZGOD]

These groups, like the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, are just common criminals masquerading as religious extremists. So easy to hide behind religion to validate your actions.

 

[j_kazmi]

The world seems to have forgotten about them ever since other issues have arised like isis and the war with palestine and israel.

 

[AssassinatedDevil]

Suicide blasts during Eid holidays kill 31 in Nigeria

Suspected Boko Haram militants using young girls as suicide bombers killed 31 people in an attack on a town in northeast Nigeria, a local official and a militia leader told AFP on Sunday.

Blasts ripped through the town of Damboa in Borno state on Saturday evening targeting people returning from celebrating the Eidul Fitr holiday, in an attack bearing all the hallmarks of Boko Haram.

Following the suicide bombings, the militants fired rocket-propelled grenades into the crowds that had gathered at the scene of the attacks, driving the number of casualties higher.

“There were two suicide attacks and rocket-propelled grenade explosions in Damboa last night which killed 31 people and left several others injured,” said local militia leader Babakura Kolo.

The suicide bombers detonated their explosives in Shuwari and nearby Abachari neighbourhoods in the town around 10:45 pm (2145GMT), killing six residents, said Kolo, speaking from the state capital Maiduguri, which is 88 kilometres (55 miles) from the town.

“No one needs to be told this is the work of Boko Haram,” Kolo said.

A local government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the death toll.

“Most of the casualties were from the rocket projectiles fired from outside the town” after the bombings, he said.

“It was later realised the suicide attacks were carried out by six underage girls whose decapitated heads were found at the scene by rescue teams.

They were between seven and 10 years, from their looks,” said the official.

The gruesome attack is the latest example of Boko Haram's continued threat to Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, said Ryan Cummings, Africa analyst at the Signal Risk consultancy in South Africa.

“Boko Haram still maintains both the intent and operational capacity to launch mass casualty attacks in parts of northeastern Nigeria,” Cummings said, despite the government's repeated claims that the group is on the back foot.

The use of the rockets is “particularly conspicuous,” Cummings said, as it “indicates that the sect continues to have access to military-grade weaponry.”

“The Boko Haram insurgency is not showing any immediate signs of easing,” said Cummings.

Suicide bombings -
The militant group has regularly deployed suicide bombers — many of them young girls — in mosques, markets and camps housing people displaced by the nine-year insurgency.

On May 1 at least 86 people were killed in twin suicide blasts targeting a mosque and a nearby market in the town of Mubi in neighbouring Adamawa state.

The attacks have devastated Nigeria's northeast, one of the country's poorest regions where illiteracy and unemployment are rampant.

Seeking purpose and money, disillusioned and jobless young men have turned to the radical Islam of Boko Haram, which decries Western colonialism and the modern Nigerian state.

In their quest to carve out a caliphate, the militants have razed towns to the ground, kidnapped women and children and slaughtered thousands of others, putting many more on the brink of starvation.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari came into power in 2015 vowing to stamp out Boko Haram, but the militants continue to stage frequent attacks, targeting both civilians and security forces.

The militants stormed the Government Girls Technical College in Dapchi on February 19, seizing over 100 schoolgirls in a carbon copy of the abduction in Chibok in 2014 that caused global outrage.

The deadly violence has put Buhari under pressure as elections approach in February next year.

Along with Boko Haram, Buhari faces the continued threat of militants in the oil-rich south, separatists in the southeast and an upsurge in communal violence in the country's central region.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1414555/suicide-blasts-during-eid-holidays-kill-31-in-nigeria

 

[Hitman]

Deplorable. Using underage girls as suicide bombers, I have nothing more to say.

 

[OMB]

Nigeria's Boko Haram militants: Six reasons they have not been defeated

Seven months into his first term in 2015 President Muhammadu Buhari coined the term, but the group and its offshoots have never gone away.

The military has managed to retake territory and dislodged the fighters from some of their hideouts. But a recent spike in deadly violence, focused in the north-east, where the Islamist group began its insurgency in 2009, has led many to ask what is at the root of the authorities' failure.

Already this year there have been nearly 100 attacks, according to one estimate, on both civilian and military targets. Hundreds have been killed and weapons, food and medicines have all been looted.

There are six main reasons why Boko Haram has not been defeated despite the government claims, experts say.

1: Root causes not addressed
An over-reliance on a military strategy to confront Boko Haram is at the heart of the state's inability to deal with the threat, argues security analyst Kabiru Adamu from Beacon Consulting.


"That's why, unfortunately, almost 11 or 12 years into the counter-insurgency operation, we are not seeing major successes," he told the BBC.

"Yes, the military will dislodge the terrorists but then because they are still able to exercise influence, they're able to recruit, they're able to generate funding, they're able to acquire weaponry, then they regroup."

Hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in north-east Nigeria and found shelter in displaced people's camps
Experts say that it is not that people in the north-east sympathise with Boko Haram and its splinter group, the Islamic State's West Africa Province, but that neglect from the authorities and desperation often drive people into the hands of the militants.

"The reality is that to address insurgency or terrorism, you need more than military operation. You need to address the root causes of the insurgency," Mr Adamu says.

"Unfortunately we haven't seen enough efforts in that regard."

He points to a lack of good governance that leaves the population impoverished, frustrated and uneducated as "one huge root cause".

There are major government initiatives that are meant to speed up development in the north-east, but little progress has been made.

There is also the National Counter-Terrorism Strategy which also involves economic development and counter-radicalisation, in addition to the deployment of troops. But Mr Kabiru says it appears the strategy is not being fully implemented.

Others, like Security analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Change, Bulama Bukarti, argue that along with deradicalisation there should be a huge surge in military activity similar to what was seen in Iraq and Syria when the Islamic State group's so-called caliphate was dismantled.

2: Boko Haram's ability to recruit
The endemic poverty in parts of the region as well as the insurgents' violent methods enable the continued recruitment of generation after generation of fighters, experts say.

"People are readily available for recruitment just to survive," security expert Abdullahi Yalwa said, citing the problems of joblessness and poor governance.

Mr Bukarti highlights the "systematic campaign of forced recruitment of young people".

Borno state Governor, Babagana Zullum, recently told the BBC that the insurgents were even recruiting people who had previously been forced from their homes by the conflict itself.

3: Lack of equipment
Even when it comes to the fighting there is the problem of weaponry, according to Mr Adamu, who says that the military is ill-equipped.

Research by his firm, Beacon Consulting, found that there were about 6.5 million small arms and light weapons in circulation in Nigeria but just 586,000 are in the hands of security forces.

It is not the case that all of the remainder are being used by the Islamist militants, but the figures highlight that there are a huge amount of weapons available that are not in the military's control.

Mr Adamu also says that "what we are seeing based on evidence is that these [armed] groups have a higher calibre of weapons, unfortunately, than the military".

4: Corruption
Corruption may be one thing that is holding the military back when it comes to improving its equipment. It is suspected that a lot of money meant to bolster the campaign against Boko Haram has ended up in officials' pockets.

Mr Yalwa says that in some cases the fight against Boko Haram is not being fought with "sincerity" and "it seems some people have turned it into merchandise and are into self-enrichment".

In recent years, the military was hamstrung by a US arms embargo over human rights abuses. President Buhari and his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, both complained that this was hampering counter-insurgency efforts.

But this was lifted by President Donald Trump in 2018 and as a result Nigeria is expecting the delivery of Super Tucano aircraft. This should build on the military's air superiority, which Mr Adamu believes is not being used to its full advantage.

Although there are claims that even this superiority is not paying off.

5: Military strategy not working
Mr Bukarti told the BBC the insurgents appear to have "understood and adapted to the pattern of military airstrikes" and are taking advantage of the difficult terrain in Nigeria's north-east to evade military attacks.

There are also other aspects of the strategy that have been criticised.

Over the past year the army has been withdrawing troops from smaller bases and concentrating them in large formations known as Super Camps.

This strategy was adopted in early 2020 when soldiers were under regular attack and their weapons were being stolen.

However, it has left vast swathes of rural communities unprotected, analysts say.

"We have evidence suggesting an increase in attacks on communities between the period when the Super Camps were created and now. So clearly the Super Camps left the rural communities more vulnerable," argues Mr Adamu.

This has also devastated the livelihoods of people in north-east Nigeria who rely on fishing and crop farming, and had an impact on food production.

The military is also hampered by gaps in intelligence gathering as well as being unable to plug information leaks.

This means that sometimes it appears that "the insurgents are ahead of the military", Mr Yalwa says.

The army disputes this alleged problem. Its spokesperson Mohammed Yarima recently said that "troops are in high fighting spirit and determined to as ever to clear the [north-east] region and the country of vestiges of Boko Haram terrorists".

6: Boko Haram's influence is spreading
Adding to the problems of dealing with Boko Haram is that the insurgency, once confined to the north-east, appears to be spreading.

There are concerns that armed criminal gangs in other parts of the north and centre of the country are forging links with the militants.

Last year, Boko Haram released a video claiming a presence in Niger state which is far from its usual area of operations. The authorities there issued a statement in March saying Boko Haram fighters had infiltrated the state occupying forests and attacking communities.

Last December, then army chief Lt Gen Yusuf Tukur Buratai suggested that the fight against Boko Haram could continue for another 20 years if the civilian and military approaches were not better co-ordinated.

The hard-pressed residents of north-eastern Nigeria will hope that warning does not come to pass.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57117296

 

[ex-q-zit]

The Abortion Assault: Nigerian military ran secret mass abortion programme in war against Boko Haram

Fati wondered if her life was over.

Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Lake Chad island village where Islamist insurgents held her and many other women captive. Shells exploded. Bullets whipped by. As her captors fled, Fati blacked out in terror.

When she awoke in a military camp nearby, “I felt the happiest I ever had in my life,” said Fati, now in her early 20s, recalling the attack that occurred several years ago in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state. Over more than a year, she told Reuters, she had been forcibly married to insurgents, beaten and repeatedly raped – resulting in a recent pregnancy. Now, finally, she had been rescued. “I was extremely grateful to the soldiers,” she said.

About a week later, Fati said, she lay on a mat in a narrow, dim room at a military barracks in Maiduguri, the state capital. It was rank, with cockroaches skittering across the floor. Uniformed men came in and out, giving her and five other women mysterious injections and pills.

After about four hours, said Fati, who was about four months pregnant, she felt searing pain in her stomach and black blood seeped out of her. The other women were bleeding as well, and writhing on the floor. “The soldiers want to kill us,” she thought.

She recalled the injections, then understood: The soldiers had aborted their pregnancies without asking – or even telling – them.

After the women washed the blood down a squat toilet, she said, they were warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.”

Since at least 2013, the Nigerian Army has run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the country’s northeast, terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters.

The abortions mostly were carried out without the person’s consent – and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witness accounts. The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant, and some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed.

This investigation is based on interviews with 33 women and girls who say they underwent abortions while in the custody of the Nigerian Army. Just one said she freely gave consent. Reporters also interviewed five civilian healthcare workers and nine security personnel involved in the programme, including soldiers and other government employees such as armed guards engaged in escorting pregnant women to abortion sites. In addition, Reuters reviewed copies of military documents and civilian hospital records describing or tallying thousands of abortion procedures.

The existence of the army-run abortion programme hasn’t been previously reported. The campaign relied on deception and physical force against women who were kept in military custody for days or weeks. Three soldiers and a guard said they commonly assured women, who often were debilitated from captivity in the bush, that the pills and injections given to them were to restore their health and fight diseases such as malaria. In some instances, women who resisted were beaten, caned, held at gunpoint or drugged into compliance. Others were tied or pinned down, as abortion drugs were inserted inside them, said a guard and a health worker.

Bintu Ibrahim, now in her late 20s, recounted how soldiers gave her two injections without her consent after picking her up with a group of other women who fled the insurgents about three years ago. When the blood came, and the terrifying pain, she knew she and the others had been given abortions. The women protested and demanded to know why, she said, until the soldiers threatened to kill them.

“If they had left me with the baby, I would have wanted it,” said Ibrahim, whose account was confirmed by a fellow former captive, Yagana Bukar.

At military facilities and in the field, some abortions proved fatal. Although Reuters could not determine the full scope of the deaths in nearly 10 years of the programme, four soldiers and two security officers said they witnessed women die from abortions, or saw their corpses afterward.

Ibrahim said she also witnessed a woman die after an injection at the time of her own abortion near a small village in the bush – an event corroborated by her companion Bukar.

“That woman was more pregnant than the rest of us, almost six or seven months,” Ibrahim said. “She was crying, yelling, rolling around, and at long last she stopped rolling and shouting. She became so weak and traumatised, and then she stopped breathing.

“They just dug a hole, and they put sand over it and buried her.”

Reuters was unable to establish who created the abortion programme or determine who in the military or government ran it.

Nigerian military leaders denied the programme has ever existed and said Reuters reporting was part of a foreign effort to undermine the country’s fight against the insurgents.

“Not in Nigeria, not in Nigeria,” said Major General Christopher Musa, who heads the military’s counterinsurgency campaign in the northeast, in a Nov. 24 interview with Reuters that addressed the abortion programme. “Everybody respects life. We respect families. We respect women and children. We respect every living soul.”

General Lucky Irabor, Nigeria’s chief of defence staff, did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters. On Dec. 2, a week after Reuters sought an interview with Irabor and shared detailed findings and questions with his office, the military's director of defence information released a five-page statement to reporters , and later posted it on Facebook and Twitter. Major General Jimmy Akpor said Reuters was motivated by “wickedness” and a “bullying” mentality, according to the statement.

“The fictitious series of stories actually constitute a body of insults on the Nigerian peoples and culture,” Akpor added. “Nigerian military personnel have been raised, bred and further trained to protect lives, even at their own risk, especially when it concerns the lives of children, women and the elderly.”

Women and girls are trapped in a titanic struggle in northeast Nigeria between the federal government and Islamist extremists – a war that has raged for 13 years. At least 300,000 people have died since the conflict began, some due to violence, many more from starvation and disease, according to the United Nations and human rights groups. The northeast, a region of semi-arid savannahs, thick forest and floodplains, once was known as the breadbasket of the nation. But in the course of the war it has collapsed into economic devastation and widespread hunger, creating massive displacement and what the U.N. has called one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Central to the abortion programme is a notion widely held within the military and among some civilians in the northeast: that the children of insurgents are predestined, by the blood in their veins, to one day take up arms against the Nigerian government and society. Four soldiers and one guard said they were told by superiors that the programme was needed to destroy insurgent fighters before they could be born.

“It’s just like sanitising the society,” said a civilian health worker, one of seven people who acknowledged performing abortions under army orders.

Four of the health workers interviewed by Reuters also said that the programme was for the good of the women and any children they might bear, who would face the stigma of being associated with an insurgent father.

The army-run abortion programme has been in place since at least 2013, and procedures were being performed through at least November of last year, according to accounts from soldiers. The enterprise has been elaborately engineered, the sources told Reuters, with pregnant former captives of insurgents transported regularly in trucks under armed guard, sometimes in convoys, to barracks or hospitals across the northeast for abortions.

The procedures have occurred in at least five military facilities and five civilian hospitals in the region, according to witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters. Many occurred in Maiduguri, the largest city in Nigeria’s northeast and the command centre of the government’s war on Islamist extremists.

The Maiduguri sites include the detention centre at Giwa Barracks, where Fati said she was forced to have an abortion. Other sites include the Maimalari Barracks, which is the city’s main military base, and two civilian hospitals – State Specialist and Umaru Shehu. The two hospitals did not comment for this story.

The full article can be accessed below:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/nigeria-military-abortions/