[Updated] We won’t return, abducted Chibok girls say in new Boko Haram video
Islamist
militants Boko Haram on Monday released a new video purporting to show
at least 14 of the Chibok schoolgirls whose mass kidnapping nearly four
years ago became a symbol of Nigeria’s brutal conflict.
But
despite a concerted global campaign for their release, and talks between
the government and the militants, the girls shown in the recording
vowed not to return to their parents.
The 20-minute-long video is
the first since May last year when another woman who also claimed to be
among the 219 seized from the town in Borno state said she wanted to
stay.
Both videos will compound the suffering of the girls’
families and friends but also indicate the extent to which they may have
become influenced by their captors.
All of those who were shown on camera were wearing black or blue hijabs and at least three were carrying babies.
One
of the students, her face covered by a veil, said: “We are the Chibok
girls that you cry for us to return to you. By the grace of Allah, we
will not return to you.
“Poor souls, we pity our other
Chibok girls who chose to return to Nigeria. Allah blessed you and
brought you to the caliphate for you to worship your creator.
“But instead you chose to return to unbelief.”
– Secular ‘folly’ –
It
was not clear when or where the latest message, in Hausa and the local
Chibok language, was recorded or whether those who appeared on camera
were under duress.
The woman speaking said the Boko Haram factional leader Abubakar Shekau had “married us off”.
“We live in comfort. He provides us with everything. We lack nothing,” she added.
Shekau
was also seen, firing a heavy machine gun and making a 13-minute-long
sermon in which he said the remaining girls had “understood the folly”
of secular education.
Boko Haram’s name broadly translates into
English from the Hausa that is widely spoken in northern Nigeria as
“Western education is sinful”.
The group has repeatedly attacked
and destroyed schools teaching a secular curriculum in its campaign to
create a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.
The
jihadists seized 276 students from the Government Girls Secondary School
in the mostly Christian town on April 14, 2014, triggering global
condemnation.
Fifty-nine of them managed to escape in the hours
that followed. A campaign for the release of their classmates has had
the support of Hollywood stars to global leaders.
A total of 107
girls have now been either found, rescued or released as part of
government negotiations with the Islamic State group affiliate.
They
have now returned to the northeast and are back in education at the
American University of Nigeria, in the Adamawa state capital, Yola.
On
January 4, the Nigerian army said it had rescued another of the girls’
classmates in the Pulka region of Borno, near the border with Cameroon.
Boko
Haram has used kidnapping as a weapon of war in the conflict, which has
killed at least 20,000 people in northeast Nigeria and displaced more
than 2.6 million.
Thousands of women and young girls have been
seized and held hostage, including as sex slaves, while men and young
boys have been forcibly recruited to fight alongside the militants.
The video also shows a group of policewomen, who were also abducted in Borno state last year.
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