This should have been big news from the moment the girls were kidnapped:

Fears for the fate of more than 200 Nigerian girls [kidnapped from school on April 14, almost 3 weeks ago] turned even more nightmarish Monday when the leader of the Islamist militant [sic: terrorist] group that kidnapped them announced plans to sell them. “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” a man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video first obtained by Agence France-Presse. “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women,” he continued, according to a CNN translation from the local Hausa language. Boko Haram is a terrorist group receiving training from al Qaeda affiliates, according to U.S. officials. Its name means “Western education is sin.” In his nearly hourlong, rambling video, Shekau repeatedly called for Western education to end. “Girls, you should go and get married,” he said.

War on women, anyone?

And this sort of thing has been going on for quite some time. The group is composed of fundamentalist Islamist terrorists who are especially against the education of women, although education of the secular variety for any child or young person in Nigeria is their target as well, and they will murder or sell into sexual slavery (let’s not mince words here) anyone they can get their hands on, all in the name of their religion. Special targets are often Christians, but Muslims are hardly except from their violence.

More here:

Gunmen abducted the girls from their dormitories at the Government Girls Secondary school in Chibok. One girl told the New Yorker that militants dressed in Nigerian military uniforms came into their dorms and told the girls they were being taken to a safe space.

From the start there’s been little doubt who did this and what their intention is. After all, Boko Haram’s goal is to wipe secular education out in Nigeria, both for Christians and for Muslims, and to establish “a ‘pure’ Islamic state ruled by sharia law.” To this end the group has committed thousands of murders, as well as many kidnappings and assassinations.

With the help of affiliates of al Qaeda (which tends to think big), Boko Haram has stepped up the scale of its terrorism in recent years. The especially large number of victims involved in this recent kidnapping is probably the only reason it is getting international press in the first place. That’s how common Boko Haram’s predations have become.

[Featured image: video via CNN]

[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]



