Nine days after they were kidnapped by terrorists from their boarding school in Borno, Nigeria, 190 girls are still missing. Or 234 girls, depending on whose reports you trust. Though schools across the Borno district had been closed for four weeks following security concerns (the whole area has been in a state of emergency for a year), the girls, aged between 16 and 18, were called back to Chibok school to re-take a physics exam.
However, they were not safe there, as men dressed as military soldiers arrived at the school at midnight on the 14th of April. The girls believed that the 'soldiers' were there to help them, but, according to BBC Radio 4, the girls were then rounded up onto lorries and were driven into the Sambisa forest in the north east of the country. The school was set alight. It is not yet known if they're being held in one place or if there are plans to move them on.
A few managed to escape either managed to jump off of the lorries, or left their hidden camps while cooking, fetching water or during prayers. ‘We thought they were soldiers and they asked us to board a vehicle which was headed towards Damboa, and my friends and I jumped from the vehicle and ran back home because we realised they didn't look innocent to us,’ Amina Shawok told Channel 4 News.
Owing to political tensions and a lack of infrastructure in the area, it is proving difficult for authorities to find the girls, and none of those who have returned to their families have been discovered or helped by the police. It is believed that the girls were kidnapped by Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram, a loosely-connected pro-Sharia group based in the north east of the country whose name literally means ‘Western education is forbidden.’ It has previously taken credit for the Abuja bus bomb which killed 75 people, and last year alone the group killed 30 teachers and destroyed 50 schools. It is part of the group's Sharia belief that women should not be given access to education. Elizabeth Donnelly, of the institute Chatham House, told BBC Radio 4 that Boko Haram is setting out ‘to establish an Islamic state out of northern Nigeria under pure Sharia law.’
However, Boko Haram, which Amnesty International claim is responsible for 1500 deaths so far this year, has not yet taken responsibility for the kidnapping of the girls, and it might not have been condoned by leaders of the group.
What is clear is that Nigerian officials haven't exactly been racing around trying to find the girls. President Goodluck Jonathan has refused to comment on the mass kidnap and security forces were forced to retract their false assertion that all but eight of the girls had been rescued.
A coalition of women's groups had taken the search on themselves. ‘We are ready to go into the bush and appeal to the Boko Haram sect to release our children to us,’ one said at a press conference. And parents had been forced to go into the bush themselves. 'I have not seen my dear daughter, she is a good girl,' Musa Muka, the mother of missing 17-year-old Martha told Channel 4 News. ‘We plead with the government to help rescue her and her friends. We pray nothing happens to her.’
But now the families have said they've been forced to call off their search because of a lack of police back-up. 'We formed a search party, riding on motorcycles into the forest, searching several places until a man gave us information that he saw our girls with the abductors ahead,' Shettima Haruna, whose daughter is missing, told The Telegraph. 'The man actually told us that our children were not far away. But he warned that the abductors were well armed and kill at will, so we decided to save our lives and returned.'
It’s weird how the search for MH370 still continues six weeks after its disappearance, with all certainty that those on board are tragically dead, yet the search for hundreds of girls who could still very much still be alive is yet to begin.
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Picture: PA
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.