LAGOS, Nigeria — A second “Chibok girl” rescued by Nigeria’s military in a forest battle with Islamic extremists was kidnapped from her home village and is not one of 218 students missing from the 2014 mass abduction by Boko Haram that sparked worldwide outrage.
The girl is one of three daughters of a pastor of the Nigerian branch of the U.S.-based Church of the Brethren kidnapped by Boko Haram in two separate attacks, community leader Pogu Bitrus said. It’s indicative of how widespread and ubiquitous are the Islamic extremists’ tactic of kidnapping girls and young women to be used as sex slaves and of forcing boys and young men to join their fight to create an Islamic caliphate.
Army spokesman Col. Sani Kukasheka Usman said soldiers freed the girl after a Thursday night battle in the northeastern Sambisa Forest, during which 97 women and children were freed and 35 extremists were killed. Usman said she was among the missing girls abducted more than two years ago from a boarding school in Chibok.
Bitrus said the girl, believed to be about 15 when she was seized, was a student at the same school but was home on vacation at the time of the kidnapping. She was later snatched from her village of Madagali, near the town of Chibok, he said, but did not know when exactly.
The first Chibok teenager to escape, Amina Ali Nkeki, 19, along with her 4-month-old baby, was discovered by hunters in the Sambisa Forest on Tuesday.