Sunday 4 May 2014
Washington vows to help fight Boko Haram
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – US Secretary of State John Kerry on
Saturday vowed that Washington will do “everything
possible” to help Nigeria deal with Boko Haram militants,
following the kidnapping of scores of schoolgirls.
“Let me be clear. The kidnapping of hundreds of children by
Boko Haram is an unconscionable crime,” Kerry said in a
policy speech in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
“We will do everything possible to support the Nigerian
government to return these young women to their homes
and hold the perpetrators to justice. That is our
responsibility and the world’s responsibility,” he said.
The US, he added, was “working to strengthen Nigeria’s
institutions and its military to combat Boko Haram’s
campaign of terror and violence”.
Gunmen believed to be Islamist fighters stormed the girls’
boarding school in the country’s northeast nearly three
weeks ago, forcing them from their dormitories onto trucks
and driving them into the bush after a gun battle with
soldiers.
Nigerian police on Friday said Boko Haram militants were
holding 223 girls of the 276 seized from the school, revising
upwards the number of youngsters abducted.
The girls’ abduction has triggered global outrage and
prompted protests in a number of Nigerian cities, as
desperate parents call on the government to secure their
release.
Nigerian mothers on Saturday vowed to hold more protests
to push a greater rescue effort from authorities.
“We need to sustain the message and the pressure on
political and military authorities to do everything in their
power to ensure these girls are freed,” protest organiser
Hadiza Bala Usman told AFP.
She said that women and mothers will on Tuesday march to
the offices of the defence minister and chief of defence staff
“to ask them what they are doing to rescue our daughters”.
“We believe there is little or no effort for now on the part of
the military and government to rescue these abducted girls,
who are languishing in some dingy forest,” she said.
Nigeria’s information minister, Labaran Maku, said on
Friday that President Goodluck Jonathan had chaired a top-
level meeting with military and security chiefs about a
possible rescue mission.
The mass kidnapping is one of the most shocking attacks in
Boko Haram’s five-year extremist uprising, which has killed
thousands across the north and centre of the country,
including 1,500 people this year alone.
A car bombing in Nigeria’s capital Abuja on Thursday that
killed 19 has fuelled fears that the Islamist group may be
shifting its focus outside of its historic base in Nigeria’s
remote northeast.
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