Two Months Out, Missing Nigerian Girls are No Closer to a Homecoming

By Hillary Crosley Coker  |  June 16, 2014 | 6:40pm
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Nearly 300 Nigerian girls have been missing since early May and while authorities say they’ve located them, there isn’t a homecoming on the horizon. Apparently, it’s just too complicated to save their lives.

In late May, Nigeria’s Air Marshal Alex Barde announced that the military had discovered the location of the missing girls. However, any extraction plan was deemed too risky because they believed the girls had been split into groups of 40-50 and if one group was saved by a military attack, the others would be killed. So nothing happened.

Meanwhile, Boko Haram is still busy kidnapping girls as recently as Monday and with the gall to do so not far from where the original group was taken, according to NBC News. They’re even attacking World Cup viewing parties because in leader Abubakar Shekau’s view, the sport goes against strict sharia law.

There have been at least three similar abductions of groups of 10 to 20 girls since the raid on a school in Chibok in which hundreds were snatched. The most recent abduction occurred on Monday, when Boko Haram fighters seized 20 more girls from a village not far from Chibok, loaded them onto trucks and drove away, the official said.

Now the Nigerian military is reportedly speaking with Sri Lankan leaders about their tactics against the Tamil Tigers insurgency, according to the Times of India, which ended in “tens of thousands” of dead civilians.

Still others feel, instead of focusing solely on Boko Haram’s crimes, people’s outrage and activism should be centered on the group’s, and others like them in countries like Pakistan, perversion of Islam claiming that girls shouldn’t be educated. Perhaps the ammunition to galvanize the world to keep caring about this atrocity lies there, writes one journalist at Al Jazeera.

Ultimately, the safe return of the girls seems to be a long shot and it breaks my heart. The #bringbackourgirls movement is fading out of the collective outrage consciousness as things do when Americans are shooting up so many places we can barely keep the breaking news straight and Iraq is reeling in terror. Still, #bringbackourgirls should still be a priority because a family’s kid remains missing and that’s absolutely awful.

Image via Getty.

 
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