African forces sent to Cameroon to fight Boko
Haram have, on several occasions, located
clusters of the schoolgirls kidnapped by the
militant group two years ago, United States
officials said.
Rescue operations have not been carried out,
the officials said, because of 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.
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 of
Chibok 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.”
Senior American military officials joined
Samantha Power, the United States ambassador
to the United Nations, in Cameroon this week to
speak with the country’s military and civilian
leaders about the fight against Boko Haram and
information gleaned by American intelligence.
The talks took place not far from where
American Special Operations forces and
hundreds of surveillance drone operators are
based. Despite the proximity of the troops, Boko
Haram’s attacks continued.
On Monday night, three Cameroonian soldiers
were killed and five were wounded after Boko
Haram fighters ambushed a military convoy near
Dabanga, a town in the country’s north,
Cameroonian military officials said. The ambush
followed intense fighting on the Nigerian side of
the border, where Boko militants attacked an
army base, wounding 22 soldiers.
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.”
Because the girls have been dispersed, military
forces from Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon might
need to mount simultaneous rescues to make
sure that Boko Haram fighters do not retaliate
for the rescue of one group. Such a
multipronged, coordinated operation would be
difficult even for highly trained American troops
with combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq
to pull off.
An image from a recent video released by Boko
Haram that purports to show a number of the
girls abducted from a school in Chibok, Nigeria,
two years ago.
CNN, VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY
IMAGES
“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.”
About 100 miles south of Maroua, the city where
Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc, top United States
Special Operations commander for Africa, met on
Monday with Cameroonian military officials,
about 200 American drone operators and Special
Operations forces worked with local troops to
gather intelligence on Boko Haram and the
whereabouts of its many hostages.
General Bolduc has recommended that the
Pentagon send dozens of additional Special
Operations advisers to the front lines of Nigeria’s
fight against Boko Haram. Such a move would
push American troops hundreds of miles closer
to the battle against an extremist group that has
killed thousands of civilians in Nigeria’s northeast
as well as in neighboring Niger, Chad and
Cameroon. The additional Special Operations
advisers would serve in noncombat advisory
roles, military officials said.
Even if the African forces continue to push back
the militants, as they have managed to do in
recent months, the hostages issue is not going
away.
There has been concern that Boko Haram,
perhaps because it is on the retreat, is
increasingly using its hostages as suicide
bombers. Few observers appear to put much
stock in the assertion by Nigeria’s president,
Muhammadu Buhari, that the militant group is
technically defeated.
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.
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