Nigeria: Disengaged

"I am not really interested in what Boko Haram's demands are. My daughter is a Christian, she will never change. I would rather she died as a prisoner than convert to Islam."
"I don't want a prisoner exchange either. Our daughters are not prisoners, and they should not be exchanged for anyone. Let the government try to rescue them. If they have a prisoner exchange, that will look like the government is giving into Boko Haram, and it will just encourage them to take more hostages. They will never stop."
"...Anything to get my daughter back."
Father of abducted Chibok high school student

"The reason why I became a Muslim is because the path we are on is not the right path. We should enter the right path so that Allah will be happy with us."
Abducted Chibok High school teen

STR/EPA

Though the government of Nigeria initially rejected out of hand the demand by the leader of Boko Haram to have all of his Islamist terror group members who are imprisoned in Nigeria released as a trigger for him to release the 220 school girls remaining under his control, they appear to have undergone a change of attitude. It may be too late to retrieve the girls who have been dispersed as slaves over the border, but with the world looking on Nigeria cannot continue to sit on its hands.

An angry and outraged world community has denounced the Nigerian leadership for its disinterested non-involvement in attempting to rescue the 300 children abducted by the jihadist group, leading Nigeria which had steadfastly rejected all international offers of assistance to retrieve the girls, to change its mind there too, almost a month after the mass abduction from a remote region of the country.

Now, the ministry of information official, Mike Omeri says: "The government of Nigeria is considering all options toward freeing the girls and reuniting them with their parents", whereas a day earlier Abba Moro, the interior minister speaking for the government stated "of course" it would refuse to negotiate under the terrorist group's conditions of swapping one group of jihadists for one group of innocent children.

Some parents, like the one quoted above are conflicted in their traumatic reaction to losing their daughters; on the one hand wanting nothing to do with the violent monsters that have continued to slaughter and to kidnap, on the other anguishing over ever seeing his child again, alive.

People living in Gamboru, a northeast border town, were attacked on four separate occasions by the Islamists, the fourth time with 300 of their people killed, a thousand shops, dozens of homes and hundreds of trucks and cars bombed and burned. They plan to move en masse to Cameroon, since it has become evident enough that the Nigerian government and its military have no intention of protecting them.

The only bridge linking northeastern Borno to Chad and Cameroon was bombed by Boko Haram; a tangled mess of concrete and girders left, enabling light traffic access. Trucks remained marooned on either side of the destroyed bridge.

Just as happened with the attack on the Chibok high school,the military had been warned by residents that they had noted suspicious camps and suspected Boko Haram fighters were preparing to attack. And, just as the attack in Chibok took place as forewarned and the military did nothing to prevent it, so too did the very same thing happen in Gamboru. The residents feel that some soldiers are in collusion with the extremists.

Getty Images A video from Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram allegedly shows the kidnapped schoolgirls wearing the full-length hijab and praying in an undisclosed rural location. 

Concerns abound that even if the whereabouts of the girls become known the security forces may not be able to mount a rescue, for fear of the hostages being killed by the group. U.S. intelligence experts have been attempting to identify clues relating to the presence of the schoolgirls contained within the forests of the northeast, through studying the video that was released a day before, of 220 schoolgirls all wearing full-length hijabs, huddled together and speaking quietly to the recording camera.

In the video, the Boko Haram leader, Abubaker Shekau, stated that the girls, mostly Christians, have voluntarily converted to Islam.