military is evacuating the females and plans to check their physical and mental health, the army spokesman said Wednesday.
Col. Sani
Usman said many are traumatized. The military is flying in medical and
intelligence teams to examine the females, he said. He said on Wednesday
that it remained to be seen if any were among the 219 who are still
missing more than a year after being snatched from a boarding school in
Chibok, a town in northeast Nigeria, in a mass kidnapping that outraged
much of the world.
The
evacuation from the Sambisa Forest in northeast Nigeria began on Tuesday
but Usman would not say where the rescued females are being taken.
He told The Associated Press that they needed to be questioned to determine their identities.
"The
processing is continuing, it involves a lot of things because most of
them are traumatized and you have got to put them in a psychological
frame of mind to extract information from them," Usman said.
While
the Chibok kidnapping on April 14, 2014, made the extremist group Boko
Haram known to much of the world, the group has been steadily kidnapping
females.
Amnesty International said this
month that at least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko
Haram since the start of 2014 and many have been forced into sexual
slavery and trained to fight
Of
the women and girls who were rescued in recent days, an intelligence
officer and a soldier said Boko Haram used some of them as armed human
shields, a first line of defense that fired at troops. But the soldiers
managed to subdue them and round them up, said the two men who spoke
only on condition of anonymity because the issue is sensitive.
Usman
said military operations continue in the forest where the women and
girls were rescued while troops destroyed four Boko Haram camps.
"Sambisa
Forest is a large expanse of land, so what we were able to get is four
out of several terrorist camps in the forest," he said of the area that
sprawls over 60,000 square kilometers (23,170 square miles).
Nigeria's
military largely stood by last year as Boko Haram took over dozens of
towns and declared a large swath of northeastern Borno state an Islamic
caliphate.That changed when a multinational offensive led by Chad began at the end of January. Now, Nigeria's military says it has driven the Islamic extremists out of all towns with help from troops from Chad and Niger while Cameroonian soldiers have been guarding their borders to prevent the militants from escaping.
Scores of abducted girls, women and men have been freed or escaped from Boko Haram in the process. It is not known how many were abducted by Boko Haram, which used them as sex slaves and fighters.
A
month ago the Nigerian military began pounding the Sambisa Forest in
air raids, an assault they said earlier they had been avoiding for fear
of killing kidnapped women and girls, or inciting their captors to kill
them.
Boko Haram continues to
attack isolated communities. The government of neighboring Niger said a
Boko Haram attack on Karamga island in Lake Chad over the weekend
killed 156 militants, 46 soldiers and 28 civilians.
Source:AP
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