One Girl’s Escape from ‘Single Most Deadly Terror Organization in the World’ By Bridget Johnson
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/05/11/one-girls-escape-from-single-most-deadly-terror-organization-in-the-world/?singlepage=true
WASHINGTON — A former congressman who was one of the foremost champions of human rights during his years on Capitol Hill returned today with one of the escaped Chibok schoolgirls to warn about the escalated threat posed by terror groups in West Africa.
Frank Wolf, who represented the 10th district of Virginia in the House from 1981 to 2015, is now a distinguished senior fellow at the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative and the Wilson Chair in Religious Freedom at Baylor University.
He told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Affairs that he traveled to Nigeria in late February, where he listened to “hundreds of individuals in small villages, and remote areas miles off the main roads” in addition to “tribal leaders, pastors, mothers and fathers as well as government officials and our own Embassy personnel.”
Wolf stressed that the death toll wreaked by Boko Haram “makes them the single most deadly terror organization in the world” — with more victims than ISIS.
Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS last year — a vow that makes the U.S. government their sworn enemy in addition to their old foe the Nigerian government, the former congressman stressed.
“Boko Haram attacks villages, conducts drive-by shootings, and uses young girls as suicide bombers. They target politicians and clerics for assassination, focusing on the symbols of Western advancement such as schools, hospitals, and churches, but also mosques. While no one has an exact number, thousands of young girls have been abducted by Boko Haram,” Wolf said.
“Just last month, we commemorated the two-year anniversary of the kidnapping of the Chibok Girls, and despite the loud protests in the West and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, it is extremely doubtful that any of the girls have been released. One counselor with whom we spoke on the ground told us that the girls who have been captured may never return without a major concerted effort by the Nigerian government and the West, and if they do they will have been the victims of sexual violence, and are often times pregnant and will have been forced to convert to Islam.”
A young Nigerian woman who wore dark glasses during the hearing and went by the pseudonym Sa’a for protection described the April 14, 2014, attack on the Government Secondary School in Chibok.
It was the second Boko Haram school attack she survived.
“They marched us out of the school for miles to where their trucks were. Then they asked us to enter the trucks and said that if we did not, they were going to shoot all of us. We were all scared, so we entered the trucks,” Sa’a said. She and a friend decided to jump from their truck while it was careening down a forest road in the dark.
When Sa’a was first offered an opportunity to continue her education in the United States, she “felt like if we go to school again they are going to kidnap us wherever we are.” Her brothers were among those who convinced her to keep studying. CONTINUE AT SITE
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