‘Let’s not give up,’ Boko Haram escapee pleads

As Boko Haram Islamic extremists drove the Nigerian girl and her classmates away from their school in the dark of night, she prayed for their lives.

Then she leaped from the pickup truck into the jungle.

Two years later, on the second anniversary of the schoolgirls’ abduction, the young woman stood in front of the U.S. Capitol with a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers who vowed to secure the release of 219 remaining captives.

Saa, the pseudonym she uses to protect her family, broke down as she recalled her friends.

“I just wish I can talk to them,” she said. “I just wish they can hear me. I just wish I can tell them how much we miss them. And I just wanted to tell the world that, let’s not give up. Let’s not forget about these girls. Let’s keep praying for them.”

Saa was consoled by Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Miami Gardens Democrat who has traveled to Nigeria to push the government to do more to secure the girls’ release.

“I will never, ever give up until we find every single girl and bring them home,” Wilson told a rally she organized to galvanize congressional action.

Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Africa subcommittee, said he’d also gone to Nigeria to work for the Christian schoolgirls’ release.

“Boko Haram is a terrorist organization that kills, maims and kidnaps primarily Christians, but it also does the same to a growing number of Muslims who disagree with their radical agenda,” Smith said.

Smith, Wilson, Rep. Lois Frankel of West Palm Beach and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California joined a dozen mainly African-American lawmakers at the rally, along with other schoolgirls who escaped.

“Boko Haram, we are not afraid of you!” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat. “We will take you on; we will challenge you; and we will find our girls.”

The Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 girls on April 14, 2014, taking them in their nightgowns from a school in the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria.

Fifty-seven girls have escaped since then, leaving 219 in captivity.

In the Nigerian capital of Abuja, hundreds of parents and other relatives of the schoolgirls staged an angry march through downtown and criticized their government for devoting inadequate resources in the search.

Several mothers identified their daughters in a new video released by Boko Haram, which showed 15 girls in black robes saying their names.

The girls in the video, apparently shot on Christmas Day last year, say they’ve been treated well. Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said they had converted to Islam.

Boko Haram leaders have demanded that, in exchange for freeing the girls, the Nigerian military release some of their commanders captured in government raids.

Boko Haram was established in 2002 and began a violent campaign in 2009. Since the Islamic State declared a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria, the Nigerian group has aligned itself with the Syrian-based terror organization and now calls itself the Islamic State’s “West Africa Province.”

“ISIL (a widely used acronym for the Islamic State) is not one terror group,” Malcolm Nance, head of the Terrorism Asymmetrics Project and a former U.S. intelligence officer, told the Capitol rally.

“It is a number of groups looking to establish a transnational caliphate stretching from Morocco and Nigeria to as far east as the Philippines,” he said. “This is a national security threat. It’s not just about the security of these women.”

Boko Haram has abducted 2,000 children since 2014, mostly in Nigeria, according to Amnesty International. Many are used as sex slaves, fighters or suicide bombers.

James Rosen: 202-383-0014; Twitter@jamesmartinrose

This story was originally published April 14, 2016 at 8:15 PM with the headline "‘Let’s not give up,’ Boko Haram escapee pleads."