US Forces Locate Chibok Girls – New York Times

The American and African forces sent to
Cameroon to fight Boko Haram have, on several
occasions, located clusters of the schoolgirls
kidnapped by the militant group two years ago,
United States officials said.
Rescue operations have not been carried out, the
officials said, because of fears that any ensuing
battle with Boko Haram fighters would put the
captives at risk, or incite some form of retaliation
against hostages still being held in other areas.
American officials said a combination of local
intelligence, intercepted communications and
drone footage had been used to locate groups of
the 276 girls abducted from the Government Girls
Secondary School in the Nigerian town of Chibok
two years ago this month.
Some of the girls have since been tracked to
Nigeria’s sprawling Sambisa Forest.
Officials insist that efforts to free the girls have
not been abandoned. They say that a major
concern is the hundreds of other women and girls
who are also held by Boko Haram, captives who
are often sexually assaulted, forced into marriages
with their tormentors, and sometimes killed.
“You’re not just looking for 200 girls,” said Gen.
Carter F. Ham, the retired head of the United
States military’s Africa Command. “There are
many, many others who have been taken hostage,
and more thousands killed, and two and a half
million people displaced.”
Senior American military officials joined
Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to
the United Nations, in Cameroon this week to
speak with the country’s military and civilian
leaders about the fight against Boko Haram and
information gleaned by American intelligence.
The talks took place not far from where American
Special Operations forces and hundreds of
surveillance drone operators are based. Despite
the proximity of the troops, Boko Haram’s attacks
continued.
On Monday night, three Cameroonian soldiers
were killed and five were wounded after Boko
Haram fighters ambushed a military convoy near
Dabanga, a town in the country’s north,
Cameroonian military officials said.
The ambush followed intense fighting on the
Nigerian side of the border, where Boko militants
attacked an army base, wounding 22 soldiers.
United States military officials said that
intelligence reports show that the girls have been
divided into smaller groups. Gen. David M.
Rodriguez, the head of the military’s Africa
Command, told reporters at the Pentagon this
month that the Chibok girls have been “moved to
some very isolated places.” General Rodriguez
added that locating them is “not an exact science.”
Because the girls have been dispersed, military
forces from Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon might
need to mount simultaneous rescues to make sure
that Boko Haram fighters do not retaliate for the
rescue of one group. Such a multipronged,
coordinated operation would be difficult even for
highly trained American troops with combat
experience in Afghanistan and Iraq to pull off.
An image from a recent video released by Boko
Haram that purports to show a number of the
girls abducted from a school in Chibok, Nigeria,
two years ago.
“So the challenge is, how do you find lots of
people held hostage in different places?” General
Ham said. “That’s really complex and it stretches
the capability of local forces.”
About 100 miles south of Maroua, the city where
Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc, top United States
Special Operations commander for Africa, met on
Monday with Cameroonian military officials,
about 200 American drone operators and Special
Operations forces worked with local troops to
gather intelligence on Boko Haram and the
whereabouts of its many hostages.
General Bolduc has recommended that the
Pentagon send dozens of additional Special
Operations advisers to the front lines of Nigeria’s
fight against Boko Haram.
Such a move would push American troops
hundreds of miles closer to the battle against an
extremist group that has killed thousands of
civilians in Nigeria’s northeast as well as in
neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon. The
additional Special Operations advisers would
serve in noncombat advisory roles, military
officials said.
Even if the African forces continue to push back
the militants, as they have managed to do in
recent months, the hostages issue is not going
away.
There has been concern that Boko Haram,
perhaps because it is on the retreat, is increasingly
using its hostages as suicide bombers.
Few observers appear to put much stock in the
assertion by Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu
Buhari, that the militant group is technically
defeated.
Col. Badjeck Didier, a spokesman for Cameroon’s
Defense Ministry, said Tuesday that he worried
that some of the Chibok girls may have been
turned into suicide bombers.
“When we see the kamikaze bombers, they have
the same age — 14-15 years — as the Chibok
girls,” Colonel Didier said. He said a recent video
released by Boko Haram that purported to show
proof of life of a number of the Chibok girls —
something the Nigerian government had
demanded as a condition of negotiations — was a
sign that the group wants to negotiate.
Tom M. Sanderson, director of the transnational
threats project at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, said that the length of the
girls’ time in captivity may have contributed to
the difficulty in rescuing them.
“These women did not chose to become suicide
bombers, but after two years of incarceration and
bearing children of these men, some of them had
to buy in out of personal survival,” Mr. Sanderson
said. “I do think that Boko Haram has considered
using these girls to kill their rescuers. And that
would cause people to have spasms over what that
symbolism meant.”
No United States official has yet made a public
assertion that the Chibok girls have been turned
into suicide bombers. Ms. Power, at a news
conference on Tuesday in the capital, Yaoundé,
said that the Special Operations forces sent by
President Obama were doing “surveillance,
intelligence and reconnaissance” and would
continue their efforts to locate the Chibok girls.
“I want to assure the parents of the Chibok girls
and the parents of any children gone missing that,
indeed, the United States is in this for the long
haul,” Ms. Power said.