Tag Archives: schoolgirls

Days after bombing, Afghans despair at three-day limit to ceasefire

KABUL (Reuters) – An announcement by the Taliban that they would cease fire for three days for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr has been met by many Afghans with little but despair, just days after a bombing that killed at least 80 people, most of them schoolgirls.

The insurgents said late on Sunday they were offering the pause in fighting so Afghans could celebrate Eid in peace. The truce is meant to come into force on Thursday morning, at a critical moment with U.S. forces in the process of withdrawing after 20 years.

But many Afghans described the short holiday pause in fighting as a fruitless gesture. The Taliban observed a similar truce last year.

“If a ceasefire had been declared some days ago, perhaps these schoolgirls would have been alive and celebrating Eid with their families,” said Shah Wali, a Kabul shopkeeper, referring to Saturday’s bomb attack on a girls school mainly attended by Shi’ite Muslim members of the Hazara ethnic minority.

“It is a good and appropriate action, but not only on the three days of Eid… we want a permanent ceasefire,” he told Reuters.

The Taliban have condemned Saturday’s bombing, which U.S. officials suspect may have been the work of a rival militant group, such as Islamic State.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment about Afghans calling for a longer ceasefire in the wake of the bombing.

University student Shugufa Azaryoon, 22, said she did not welcome the ceasefire at all. Previous ceasefires had been used by Taliban fighters only to regroup and launch attacks after Eid, she said.

PERMANENT CEASEFIRE HASHTAG

The Afghan government wants the Taliban to agree to a more comprehensive ceasefire to promote political talks. The Taliban say they want to lay down their arms, but cannot do so permanently until a political settlement is reached.

Meanwhile, the hashtag “AfghansWantPermanentCeasefire” trended in Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter in the lead up to Eid, which marks the end of the Ramadan holy fasting month.

Facebook user Sadaf Jamali wrote: “I kill people in Ramadan, I don’t kill people in Eid, but after Eid I will (kill) them again…This is Taliban’s logic #AfghansWantPermanentCeasefire”.

A day before the ceasefire was to begin, Taliban insurgents launched an offensive and took control of a key district located an hour’s drive from the capital Kabul.

Washington, which is pulling its remaining troops out of Afghanistan over the next four months, had long said its withdrawal was conditional on the Taliban reducing violence, but now says it is leaving no matter what.

U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad welcomed the announcement of the three-day ceasefire, but said on Twitter that “Afghans deserve much more: a political settlement & a permanent ceasefire.”

Government employee Saifullah Khan said the three-day ceasefire did not leave enough time to travel to spend the holiday with his family, who live in a village two-days’ journey away.

“I wish they had announced a longer ceasefire,” he said. “Like hundreds of thousands of other Afghans I have to wait for a real and permanent ceasefire…only a miracle can make this possible.”

(Reporting by Kabul newsroom; Editing by Peter Graff)

‘They said they’ll shoot’: Nigerian schoolgirls recount kidnap ordeal

By Afolabi Sotunde and Seun Sanni

GUSAU, Nigeria (Reuters) – Gunmen have freed all 279 girls kidnapped from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, officials said on Tuesday, as victims told how their abductors had beaten and threatened to shoot them.

The pupils from Jangebe, a town in Zamfara state, were seized just after midnight on Friday. All had now been freed, Zamfara Governor Bello Matawalle said.

Umma Abubakar, among those released, described their ordeal.

“Most of us got injured on our feet and we could not continue trekking, so they said they will shoot anybody who did not continue to walk,” she told Reuters.

Boarding schools in northern Nigeria have become targets for mass kidnappings for ransom by armed criminal gangs, a trend started by the jihadist group Boko Haram and continued by its offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province.

Friday’s raid on the Government Girls Science Secondary School was the second such abduction in little over a week in the northwest, a region increasingly targeted by gangs.

Governor Matawalle said “repentant bandits” working with the government under an amnesty program had helped secure the Jangebe girls’ release.

“Those repentant ones are working for us, and they are working for the government and they are working for security,” he said.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said the rise in abductions has been fueled in part by sizeable government payoffs in exchange for child hostages.

The national government denies this, and President Muhammadu Buhari warned on Tuesday against making payoffs.

Matawalle’s special media adviser, Zailani Bappa, said Zamfara authorities had paid no ransom for the Jangebe girls.

Initial reports put the number kidnapped at 317, but Zamfara government spokesman Sulaiman Tanau Anka said the total was 279, as some of the girls had run into the bush at the time of the raid.

‘THEY HIT US WITH GUNS’

Reuters journalists in Zamfara’s state capital, Gusau, saw dozens of girls in Muslim veils sitting in a hall in a state government building. A few parents arrived, and one father wept with joy after seeing his daughter.

Most of the girls appeared unharmed, but at least a dozen were sent to hospital.

Farida Lawali, 15, told how she and the other girls had been taken to a forest by the kidnappers.

“They carried the sick ones that cannot move. We were walking in the stones and thorns,” she said, sitting in the government house building, covered in a light blue veil.

“They started hitting us with guns so that we could move,” she added. “While they were beating them with guns, some of them were crying and moving at the same time.”

President Buhari said news of the girls’ release brought “overwhelming joy,” while warning that ransom payments would continue to encourage abductions, and urging the police and the military to bring the kidnappers to justice.

One father, whose seven daughters were among those kidnapped and freed, said the incident would not deter him from schooling his children.

“It’s a ploy to deny our girls … from getting the Western education in which we are far behind,” Lawal Abdullahi told Reuters. “We should not succumb to blackmail. My advice to government is that they should take immediate precautions to stop further abductions.”

The U.N. children’s agency UNICEF urged the Nigerian government to protect schools so children will not be fearful of going to school, and parents afraid of sending their children to school.

As recently as Saturday, gunmen released 27 teenage boys who had been kidnapped from their school on Feb. 17 in Niger state.

In 2014, Boko Haram abducted more than 270 schoolgirls from the northeasterly town of Chibok, in Nigeria’s most high-profile school kidnapping. Around 100 remain missing.

(Reporting by Afolabi Sotunde in Gusaur and Alexis Akwagyiram in Lagos; Additional reporting by Ardo Hazzad in Bauchi, Seun Sanni in Gusau, Hamza Ibrahim in Kano, Felix Onuah in Abuja and Maiduguri Newsroom; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Giles Elgood; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and John Stonestreet)

Militants free scores of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls after month in captivity

Some of the newly-released Dapchi schoolgirls are pictured in Jumbam village, Yobe State, Nigeria March 21, 2018. REUTERS/REUTERS/Ola Lanre

By Ola Lanre and Abraham Achirga

DAPCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Islamist militants freed scores of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls on Wednesday, driving them back into the town where they had been captured a month ago.

The captors gave no reason for their release, which triggered celebrations and tears, but the government denied that a ransom had been paid. Several of the girls said some of their friends had died in captivity and one was still being held.

The fighters from the Boko Haram group, some shouting “God is greatest”, drove the girls back into the northeast town of Dapchi in a line of trucks in the morning and dropped them off before leaving, witnesses told Reuters. Some residents fled as the convoy rolled in.

“I don’t know why they brought us back but they said because we are children of Muslims,” one of the freed girls, Khadija Grema, told Reuters.

After the release, in the nearby village of Jumbam, some of the girls held each other and wept, huddling on the ground in beige hijabs as residents stood around them.

Aliyu Maina, reunited with his 13-year-old daughter, said the fighters “stopped and blocked the road, they didn’t talk to anybody, they didn’t greet anybody”.

“They said people should make space for people to recognize their children and I got my child.”

Boko Haram has waged a insurgency for nine years in northeast Nigeria and neighboring states in which tens of thousands of people have been killed, more than 2 million displaced and thousands abducted.

A 2015 military campaign drove the group from most territory it controlled, but much of the area remains beyond government rule, and insurgents still stage attacks from strongholds near Lake Chad.

The kidnapping of 110 girls aged 11-19 on Feb. 19 from Dapchi was the biggest mass abduction since Boko Haram took more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014 – a case that triggered international outrage.

Dapchi residents said more than 100 girls had returned on Wednesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, the Nigerian government was transporting the girls by bus to Maiduguri, one of the largest cities in the northeast and the hub for the fight against Boko Haram.

“One girl is still with them because she is a Christian,” said Grema, the freed student. “About five are dead but it was not as if they killed them – it was because of the stress and trauma that made them tired and weak.”

“They didn’t harm us,” Grema added. “They were giving us food, very good food. We didn’t have any problem.”

She described how, after the kidnapping, the girls were transported by car and canoe, moving through villages and along waterways to a safehouse.

Another girl who gave her name as Fatima said two of her friends were among those who died, trampled as they were being transported.

“They kept us in a big, covered house where no one could spot where we were, even by air we could not be seen,” said Fatima.

Muhammad Bursari said his niece Hadiza Muhammed, another of the freed girls, told him the remaining student was still in captivity because she had refused to convert to Islam.

NO RANSOM

Nigeria’s information minister, Lai Mohammed, said in a statement 101 released girls had been registered so far.

“No ransom was paid to them to effect this release,” he told Reuters separately. The only condition they gave us is not to release (the girls) to the military but release them in the town of Dapchi without the military presence.”

Nigeria had secured the release “through back-channel efforts and with the help of some friends of the country,” Mohammed said in the statement.

“For the release to work, the government had a clear understanding that violence and confrontation would not be the way out as it could endanger the lives of the girls, hence a non-violent approach was the preferred option,” it said.

Boko Haram never explained why the girls were taken, but many Nigerians speculated that the goal was ransom. Boko Haram received millions of euros for the release of some of the Chibok girls last year.

The abduction piled pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to power in 2015 promising to crack down on the insurgency. He is expected to seek re-election next year.

Mohammed Dala said he had found his 12-year-old daughter in a crowd of the girls in the center of town.

“Some motors painted in military color came with our girls,” he told Reuters. “They (the militants) … said we should not flee. They dropped the girls at the center of town, near Ali’s tea shop. I found my daughter and left.”

Most of the other girls were taken to a hospital guarded by the military, witnesses said.

(Reporting by Ola Lanre and Abraham Achirga in Dapchi, Afolabi Sotunde and Felix Onuah in Abuja, Ardo Hazzad in Bauchi and Ahmed Kingimi in Maiduguri; Writing by Paul Carsten; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Peter Graff)