Two former schoolgirls who were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents eight years ago have been found by Nigerian troops, the military announced on Tuesday, liberating some of the final captives from the 2014 Chibok kidnapping.
Recall, on June 15, the military said that they had found one of the Chibok girls named Mary Ngoshe. She turned out to be Mary Dauda.
After being held captive by terrorists who invaded their school in northeast Nigeria in April 2014 in a mass kidnapping that sparked international outcry, the two victims were introduced by the military while each had babies on their laps.
The girls were discovered by forces on June 12 and June 14 in two distinct places, according to Major-General Christopher Musa, the military commander of the troops in the area.
“We are very lucky to have been able to recover two of the Chibok girls,” Musa said.
In the first mass school kidnapping carried out by Boko Haram, dozens of terrorists raided the Chibok girls’ boarding school in 2014 and loaded 276 students, who were between the ages of 12 and 17, into vehicles.
Shortly after being kidnapped, fifty-seven of the girls were able to escape by jumping from the trucks, and 80 others were freed in return for three Boko Haram commanders who had been imprisoned as a result of negotiations with the Nigerian government.
According to current reports, one of the ladies, Hauwa Joseph, was discovered on June 12 around Bama with other civilians after troops stormed a Boko Haram camp, while Mary Dauda was discovered later outside Ngoshe village in Gwoza region, close to the Cameroonian border.
“I was nine when we were kidnapped from our school in Chibok and I was married off not long ago and had this child,” Joseph told reporters at the military headquarters.
“We were abandoned, no one cared to look after us. We were not being fed,” she said.
In a military operation, Joseph’s husband and father-in-law were slain, leaving her and her 14-month-old boy on their own.
Over the past year, several Boko Haram fighters and their families have turned themselves in as they run from government airstrikes and internal strife with the rival Islamic State West Africa Province, SWAP.
Since 2009, the violence has resulted in more than 40,000 fatalities and 2.2 million additional displacements.
Dauda, who was 18 years old when she was abducted, was married to Boko Haram fighters on several occasions in the group’s stronghold in Sambisa forest.
“They would starve and beat you if you refused to pray,” Dauda said about life under Boko Haram.
She decided to flee and told her husband she was visiting another Chibok girl in Dutse village near Ngoshe, close to the border with Cameroon.
Dauda hiked all night to Ngoshe with the assistance of an elderly man who lived outside the hamlet with his family before turning herself in to the military the next morning.
“All the remaining Chibok girls have been married with children. I left more than 20 of them in Sambisa, she said. “I’m so happy I’m back.”
In 2018, militants from the Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP, abducted 110 schoolgirls from the Government Girls Science and Technical College (GGSTC) Dapchi in the neighboring Yobe state. The girls ranged in age from 11 to 19 years.
Except for Leah Sharibu, the sole Christian among the girls, who was imprisoned by the gang because she refused to forsake her faith, all of the schoolgirls were released a month later.