Western powers, including the U.S., U.K. and France, said
Wednesday they would join the search for hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls
kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, as parents' frustration grew over the
government's response.
A small team of U.S. military personnel is expected to
arrive in Abuja, Nigeria, in the coming days to help in the search. The team
will be composed of roughly 10 uniformed soldiers from AFRICOM headquarters in
Stuttgart, Germany.
They will be logistics and communications experts who will
assess the situation and advise Nigerian officials, according to Pentagon
spokesman Col. Steve Warren, who said the U.S. military has no plans to carry
out a rescue mission.
The team is part of a larger U.S. contingent that includes
officials from the FBI and the departments of Defense, Justice and State. The
total number of U.S. personnel is not expected to exceed 20 members.
The French government said Wednesday it would send security
service agents to help track down the Boko Haram terror group and its hostages.
They are thought to be hiding in abandoned military bunkers inside the remote
Sambisa Forest -- eight times larger than Yellowstone National Park and full of
poisonous snakes.
"In the face of such ignominy, France must react. This
crime cannot be left unpunished," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told
lawmakers, according to Reuters.
China, meanwhile, has offered to send satellite intelligence
to help Nigeria's army locate the girls and the U.K. plans to send in a team of
experts, The
Wall Street Journal reported.
The pledges of support came amid mounting frustration among
parents of the kidnapped girls who are worried about what Boko Haram leader
Abubakar Shekau and his army of jihadist fighters might do to their daughters
in the days to come.
The group has vowed to sell into slavery the roughly 275
kidnapped teenage girls.
"We don't know where they are and we don't know what is
happening to them," one parent, who declined to be identified, told Deutsche
Welle. He said some parents are so afraid to lose their daughters that they
have stopped eating.
The Nigerian government is offering a $300,000 reward for
information leading to Shekau's capture. And the United States is offering a
reward of up to $7 million for information leading to his location.
Local residents have reportedly pooled money for motorcycles
to head into the forest in search of the girls missing since last month’s
abduction and those who have since been abducted.
Nigeria's government has come under fire over its response
to the kidnapping.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016
Democratic presidential candidate, said Wednesday that the Nigerian government
has been "somewhat derelict in its responsibility toward protecting boys
and girls, men and women, in northern Nigeria in the last years.
But a senior adviser to Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan
told The
Washington Post that it was "not helpful" to fault the
government. He called for greater international assistance in the country's
fight against terrorism.
"The Nigerian government is doing all it can in collaboration
with its allies to ensure that our daughters, the girls, are brought back home
— everything in its power," Douglas told the paper during a visit to
Washington on Wednesday.
At least two girls reportedly have died of snakebites, and
roughly 20 others are thought to be ill.
Shekau made his plans clear in a video released Monday in
which he gloated about the kidnappings.
"I abducted your girls," he said in the hour-long
video that opens with fighters shooting guns into the air and shouting
"Allahu akbar" and "By Allah, I will sell them in the
marketplace.”
Shekau's army is estimated to number from a few hundred to a
few thousand fighters.
In recent days, Boko Haram also has raided villages in and
around the forest, including a raid Monday night on a village near the border
with Chad in which eight more girls were kidnapped.
A source said the hostages are being transported from one
base to another, typically during the cover of nightfall, to avoid detection.
Shekau was reportedly Boko Haram’s deputy leader until its
founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed by local authorities in 2009.
In 2012, Shekau was declared a “specially designated global
terrorist” for numerous bombings, including the August 2011 attack on the
United Nations office complex in Nigeria’s capital, Abuj, that killed 23 people
and injured dozens more.
On Wednesday, as many as 300 people were killed when
extremists attacked the town of Gamboru Ngala on Nigeria's border with
Cameroon, according to local reports.
The attack and hundreds of casualties were confirmed by
Borno state information commissioner Mohammed Bulama who spoke to The
Associated Press by telephone.
Shops and homes were set ablaze and razed in the attack, he
said.occupies a 25-by-25 foot patch of land at the ski resort. But the agency
reversed itself in 2012 amid public outcry
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