Nigerian Army soldiers said on Tuesday they discovered a woman in the Ngoshe area of Borno state believed to have been kidnapped in 2014 by the jihadist terror group Boko Haram in the nearby Borno town of Chibok, the Premium Times online newspaper reported Wednesday.
“Troops of 26 Task Force Brigade on patrol around Ngoshe in Borno State on 14 June 2022 intercepted one Mrs Mary Ngoshe and her son. She is believed to be one of the abducted girls from GGSS [Government Girls Secondary School] Chibok in 2014. Further exploitation ongoing [sic],” the Nigerian Army’s official Facebook page said in a statement.
The social media post, also published by the Nigerian Army’s official Twitter page, included what appeared to be a photo of Mary holding her young son. If accurate, the Nigerian Army’s report suggests that Mary was one of the 276 mainly Christian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in April 2014 from a government-run boarding school in Chibok. The town of Chibok is located roughly 100 miles southwest of Ngoshe, where Mary was found by Nigerian soldiers on June 14.
Members of Boko Haram forcibly seized nearly 300 schoolgirls from the dormitories of a Chibok high school on the night of April 14, 2014. The Islamic terrorists loaded the students onto trucks outside the school and subsequently drove the group to Boko Haram’s historic stronghold in the nearby Sambisa Forest of Borno state. Some of the Chibok girls managed to escape during this initial journey to Sambisa Forest, while other abductees eventually ran away from their captors in subsequent weeks, months, and years.
Amnesty International reported on April 13, almost exactly eight years after the mass Chibok abduction, that “109 of the girls remain in captivity, and at least 16 have been killed.”
“Of the 276 pupils aged 12 to 17 who were abducted by the group on April 14, 2014, 57 of the girls managed to escape by jumping off trucks they had been herded on,” Al Jazeera recalled on June 15.
“Eighty-two others were later released in exchange for some detained Boko Haram commanders following back-channel talks with the Nigerian government,” according to the Qatari news outlet.
Of the Chibok girls still missing, “some are believed to have been married off to fighters according to propaganda videos released by Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s late leader,” Al Jazeera noted.
Boko Haram targeted Chibok’s Government Girls Secondary School in April 2014 as part of a stated aim to eradicate Western education and culture from northeastern Nigeria. The jihadist group has carried out a violent insurgency in the region since 2009 with the goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the Lake Chad Basin, which is bordered by Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. Despite unfounded claims by Nigeria’s federal government that it has allegedly “defeated” Boko Haram, the group has continued to wreak havoc across much of Nigeria in recent months and has seemingly expanded its territory well beyond the nation’s northeast.