Senior US officials have told the New York Times that the general location of the Chibok girls and other abducted persons has been known to American and African forces for over two years.
The officials said the reason the girls had not been rescued as of yet is due to “fears that any ensuing battle with Boko Haram fighters would put the captives at risk, or incite some form of retaliation against hostages still being held in other areas.”
The New York Times reports:
American officials said a combination of local intelligence, intercepted communications and drone footage had been used to locate groups of the 276 girls abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School in the Nigerian town ofChibok two years ago this month. Some of the girls have since been tracked to Nigeria’s sprawling Sambisa Forest.
Officials insist that efforts to free the girls have not been abandoned. They say that a major concern is the hundreds of other women and girls who are also held by Boko Haram, captives who are often sexually assaulted, forced into marriages with their tormentors, and sometimes killed.
“You’re not just looking for 200 girls,” said Gen. Carter F. Ham, the retired head of the United States military’s Africa Command. “There are many, many others who have been taken hostage, and more thousands killed, and two and a half million people displaced.”
United States military officials said that intelligence reports show that the girls have been divided into smaller groups. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the head of the military’s Africa Command, told reporters at the Pentagon this month that the Chibok girls have been “moved to some very isolated places.” General Rodriguez added that locating them is “not an exact science.”
“So the challenge is, how do you find lots of people held hostage in different places?” General Ham said. “That’s really complex and it stretches the capability of local forces.”
Col. Badjeck Didier, a spokesman for Cameroon’s Defense Ministry, said Tuesday that he worried that some of the Chibok girls may have been turned into suicide bombers.
“When we see the kamikaze bombers, they have the same age — 14-15 years — as the Chibok girls,” Colonel Didier said. He said a recent video released by Boko Haram that purported to show proof of life of a number of the Chibok girls — something the Nigerian government had demanded as a condition of negotiations — was a sign that the group wants to negotiate.
Tom M. Sanderson, director of the transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the length of the girls’ time in captivity may have contributed to the difficulty in rescuing them.
“These women did not chose to become suicide bombers, but after two years of incarceration and bearing children of these men, some of them had to buy in out of personal survival,” Mr. Sanderson said. “I do think that Boko Haram has considered using these girls to kill their rescuers. And that would cause people to have spasms over what that symbolism meant.”
No United States official has yet made a public assertion that the Chibok girls have been turned into suicide bombers. Ms. Power, at a news conference on Tuesday in the capital, Yaoundé, said that the Special Operations forces sent by President Obama were doing “surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance” and would continue their efforts to locate the Chibok girls.
“I want to assure the parents of the Chibok girls and the parents of any children gone missing that, indeed, the United States is in this for the long haul,” Ms. Power said.