Analysts in Africa say the kidnapping of almost 300 girls by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram could be a mistake that leads to the destruction of the group.
Rev. Kristopher Keating of World Horizons USA, said the uproar in Nigeria and around the world is putting a focus on the terrorists they didn’t anticipate. The Nigerian people are also taking advantage of the sudden world stage to show the suffering the Islamists have brought to the country.
“People are hungry to know that their suffering here is not going unnoticed, that reports of this particular instance of large scale abduction are, for seemingly the first time in this country, causing people to take to demonstration and public outcry against Boko Haram,” Keating told The Christian Post on Monday evening. “This could be a catalyzing event that breaks Boko Haram in Nigeria.”
Rev. Keating said many Christian leaders from around the world are traveling to the African nation to lead worship and prayer services to ask God to bring the girls home safely and for protection over the soldiers who are trying to bring the terrorists to justice.
Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram has released a video where they offer to release some of the girls they kidnapped in return for terrorists behind held in Nigerian prisons.
Terrorist leader Abubakar Shekau says in the 17-minute video that he will only release the girls that have not “submitted” to the terrorists, which from the video implies they have converted to Islam and are serving as slaves to the terrorists.
“The girls, these girls you occupy yourself with…we have indeed liberated them,” Shekau said. “These girls have become Muslims. We will never release them until after you release our brethren. Here I mean those girls who have not submitted.”
The international search for the kidnapped girls is now increasing in speed as teams from the United States and Great Britain arrive in Nigeria. The international effort is very diverse with countries as small as Israel sending in special forces units to help try to find and save the girls.
The United States Department of State announced they are offering to send a team into Nigeria to find the over 200 girls kidnapped by the Islamic terror group Boko Haram.
The offer comes as Boko Haram has made another brazen attack on a Nigerian village, murdering 150 people at a crowded outdoor marketplace. The terrorists laughed and yelled “Allahu Akbar” as they threw improvised bombs and fired rocket-propelled grenades into innocent civilians.
The terrorists also set fire to buildings where people tried to take shelter from the murderous rampage.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. will establish a “coordination cell” to provide intelligence, investigations and expertise in hostage negotiation. U.S. military personnel will be part of the cell and based at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron said they will be sending experts to assist the American team.
Boko Haram has kidnapped more girls.
The Islamic terrorist group, currently the subject of an international hunt after kidnapping over 200 girls from a school last month, abducted eight more girls from northeastern Nigeria overnight.
The girls were aged 12 to 15 like the other girls the group has kidnapped.
Residents of the village of Warabe said that the terrorists fired on homes in the village during the raid.
“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army color. They started shooting in our village,” a villager told Yahoo news.
The girls were reportedly thrown into a truck with livestock and food and rushed out of the village. The Islamists have not commented whether those girls will be auctioned off as they threatened to do with the first batch of kidnapped girls.
Nigerian officials admitted they mislead the media regarding an attack by Islamic extremists Boko Haram where they invaded a girl’s school and carried off the students.
Security officials had initially said that 85 girls were taken but now admit the terrorist group seized 234 girls.
The admission from the regional military officials came after the governor of Borno state demanded to be taken to the site of the attacks and be allowed to question troops that were supposed to be protecting the school.
Military police say they are in “hot pursuit” of the kidnappers but none of the girls have been found. The girls, between 16 and 18, were reportedly science students at the school undergoing physics exams.
Boko Haram has pledged to kidnap Christian girls in the region to force into conversion to Islam and forced marriages. Girls who have been rescued from previous Boko Haram kidnappings say they were forced to be cooks and sex slaves.
Boko Haram has increased their actions this year, with over 1,500 people killed and thousands kidnapped.
Seventy-one people died and over 120 were injured when a bomb exploded under a bus in a crowded bus station in Abuja, Nigeria.
Christian leaders in the nation said that the attack was carried out by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram in their deadliest attack on the country’s capital.
Friar Patrick Tor Alumuku, the director of Communications for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja, told reporters that the bus depot where the explosion happened destroyed 16 luxury busses and 24 minibuses.
“The bus depot where the explosion took place is normally used by a large number of commuters to get to work in the center of the capital,” FFr. Alumuku said. “The victims are therefore normal people, who belong to the working class.”
The bus station was described as being in a “poor, ethnically and religiously mixed” area. Boko Haram has been working to create a civil war in the nation that is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims.
An surprise terror attack on a school just before dawn has left at least 29 children dead.
Nigerian military spokesman said Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram targeted the school before dawn so they could kill as many children as possible before they realized they were under attack.
A teacher in the school told reporters that the terrorists set fire to a boy’s dormitory and then stood by any window that did not have bars in front of it to slit the throats of any student who tried to escape the flames.
Spokesman Abdullahi Bego said he could not tell why the school was left unprotected by government troops and that the state’s Governor would ask the federal government why they were not there. Students and teachers quickly abandoned another school in the state after military troops withdrew their protection Monday.
Nigerian Islamic terrorist organization Boko Haram has taken to a new tactic to try and boost the morale of their soldiers. They are kidnapping Christian women, forcing them to convert to Islam through violence and then are forcing them to marry terrorist fighters.
A 19-year-old woman identified only as Hajja escaped from the group after four months of captivity. The Christian woman said she was forced multiple times to kneel and beaten while her captors yelled at her to worship Allah. She said she eventually pretended to go along with them because a fighter told her she was about to be beheaded.
She told reporters that she was forced to be a slave for a group of fourteen terrorists and was used as bait to lure in civilians working with the military so that the terrorists could slit their throats. She reported being forced to watch multiple murders at the hands of her captors.
Hajja now lives in the nation’s capital city of Abuja and is free to worship Christ. She says that she has trouble sleeping at night because of nightmares related to her captivity.
The Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram has targeted Christians for extermination in northern Nigeria and has killed more people for their faith in Christ in one year than the rest of the world’s martyrdom of Christians combined.
The Jubilee Campaign released a report showing that close to 1,200 Christians were killed for their faith in northern Nigeria. The persecution watchdog group Open Doors agreed with Jubilee’s data that more Christians have been killed in Nigeria than the rest of the world combined in the last year.
The group released their information at an event sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.
One of the event’s speakers was Adamu Habila, a Nigerian Christian who survived being shot in the head at close range by a Boko Haram militant when he refused to convert to Islam.
“I give thanks to God Almighty for keeping me alive up to this moment. I know if not because of God I am a dead man now,” said Habila. “But because of His grace I am still alive in order to testify the goodness of God in my life and the work of God in my life.”
The U.S. State Department officially declared Boko Haram a terrorist organization last week.
The United States has officially designated the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram as a “foreign terrorist organization” in a step designed to help Nigeria eliminate the group.
The move means that U.S. regulatory agencies can block business and financial transactions with the group. They can also seize assets of the organization that are found in U.S. owned companies or banks.
The state department said in a press statement that this is “only one tool in what must be a comprehensive approach by the Nigerian government to counter these groups.”
The group had not been given the official designation because the U.S. had considered the group only a domestic terror group. The move by the state department comes from the belief that the group has been working on an international agenda since connecting with al-Qaeda.
