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.
Source: Women in the World .
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