Dr. Andrew Pocock, former British high commissioner to Nigeria, says that British and American surveillance found the location of up to 80 of Nigeria’s Chibok girls (276 of whom were kidnapped on April 14, 2014 by Boko Haram), but that a rescue was not attempted because it would have been too risky. “You might have rescued a few but many would have been killed,” Pocock told The Sunday Times of London, adding that the girls were likely to be used by the terrorists as human shields. The discovery of the girls was made a month after the kidnapping, and the information was passed on to the Nigerian government who made no request for help.
Dr. Stephen Davis, who spent months in Nigeria trying to negotiate the schoolgirls’ freedom, said that South African mercenaries working with the Nigerian military had released around 1,000 other girls who had been abducted by Boko Haram. Davis says he finds the logic behind the decision not to act questionable: “If [South African mercenaries] could release that many,” he says, “that belies the argument that the girls would be killed in the process.”
The abduction of the schoolgirls two years ago sparked the #BringBackOurGirls (BBOG) campaign, but, apart from 57 girls who escaped early on, the rest are still missing. Campaigners believe the girls have been divided into small groups and taken into Islamic militant-held areas such as the Sambisia forest, which covers an area three times the size of Wales.
yahoo.com
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