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U.S. prepares to dispatch small team to Nigeria to assist in search for kidnapped girls U.S. prepares to dispatch small team to Nigeria to assist in search for kidnapped girls
(about 7 hours later)
The Pentagon said Wednesday that it was making preparations to dispatch a small team to Nigeria in coming days to assist the government there with the search for hundreds of Ni­ger­ian schoolgirls abducted by Islamist militants. As the Obama administration on Wednesday began preparing to deploy a team of military and civilian advisers to aid in the search for abducted Nigerian schoolgirls, members of Congress pressed for a more muscular response to the militant Islamist group that carried out the mass kidnapping last month.
Officials said they intend to send a group of fewer than 10 military personnel with expertise in communications, intelligence and operations planning. That team is expected to arrive in the Nigerian capital within days and will operate alongside U.S. civilian personnel from other agencies, said Lt. Col. Myles Caggins, a Pentagon spokesman. While international plans to help the Nigerian government were being drawn up, new reports emerged Wednesday of widespread violence in the country’s northeast, where the extremist group Boko Haram has sought to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law. About 300 people were killed by militants in Gamboru Ngala, a town near the border with Cameroon,
Caggins said the military officers would work from the U.S. Embassy in Abuja. He said officials from both countries are still discussing the type of intelligence-gathering and surveillance tools the United States might be able to contribute. the Associated Press reported.
“There is nothing definitive,” Caggins said. “No assets have been committed to this operation.” Officials in Washington said a team of fewer than 10 U.S. military personnel and civilians from intelligence and law enforcement agencies were expected to arrive in the Nigerian capital within days to set up a “coordination cell” of advisers with technical and logistics expertise.
An international uproar has been mounting over the fate of the Ni­ger­ian schoolgirls, roughly 300 of whom were seized from a school in remote northeastern Nigeria. Some escaped, but 276 are believed still missing. In a video released Monday in which he asserted responsibility for the abductions for the first time, the leader of the Islamist group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, referred to the girls as “slaves” and threatened to sell them in a marriage market. Officials at the Pentagon said they did not anticipate that U.S. ground troops would be deployed to join the search and noted that no American surveillance assets have been brought to bear.
President Obama, speaking Tuesday about climate change on NBC’s “Today” show, also spoke briefly about Nigeria, calling the kidnappings a “terrible situation” and describing Boko Haram as “one of the worst local or regional terrorist organizations.” He said that Nigeria had accepted his offer of “help from our military and our law enforcement officials” and that “we’re going to do everything we can to provide assistance to them.” “We’re still working on ways we can work with the Nigerians,” Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III said. “No assets have been committed to this operation.”
On Capitol Hill, all 20 female U.S. senators signed a letter to Obama condemning the abductions and calling on him to press for U.N. sanctions against Boko Haram, which the administration has designated a foreign terrorist group. The move was led by Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine.) Prominent members of Congress called for a far more robust U.S. role. Rep. Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he would convene a hearing to “examine the administration’s response to the abhorrent and appalling kidnappings.” He called on the administration to develop a “long-term strategic, multifaceted approach to help Nigeria combat Boko Haram.”
Collins said the comments by Shekau, who said all girls should be married by age 12 and not allowed to attend school, “call out for a vigorous response from all around the world — men and women alike. But I think having the 20 women senators lead the way is the beginning of sending a very powerful signal.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement that dispatching U.S. advisers should be “just the first step.” Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, added that she would “support whatever actions are necessary to locate, capture and eliminate the terrorists responsible for this reprehensible act.”
A social-media campaign called Bring Back Our Girls has gained rapid traction on Facebook and other sites over the past several days. In Washington, about 75 protesters rallied outside the shuttered Ni­ger­ian Embassy on Tuesday morning wearing “Bring Back Our Girls” T-shirts and denouncing the government of President Goodluck Jonathan for ignoring the girls’ plight. The Nigerian government, which has played down the strength of Boko Haram, publicly welcomed this week’s offers of assistance from Washington. In the past, however, President Goodluck Johnson’s administration has been unwilling to heed U.S. advice and accept offers of support to combat the rise of Islamist militancy in the country’s northeast.
“We are tired of the government putting its head in the sand. Girls in Nigeria have the right to be educated and the right to be safe,” said Omolola Adele Oso, 35, a Nigerian immigrant from Bowie, Md., and a leader of the peaceful protest. “These girls could be beaten and burned into subservience. The government wants this problem to disappear, but it will not disappear.” “The Nigerians have shown a reluctance to accept not only our assistance but also a reluctance to accept some of our analytic advice,” said Johnnie Carson, who was assistant secretary of state for Africa until last year. “It is important that the Nigerians accept this.”
Most of the demonstrators were Ni­ger­ian immigrants, but they were joined by local human rights activists and families. Amy Thomson, 43, of Chevy Chase, Md., said she had come to the rally “because I’m a mother and I would feel the same if my daughter were in danger.” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. ambassador in Abuja, James F. Entwistle, met Wednesday with Nigeria’s national security adviser to start making a formal assessment of the capabilities Washington could bring to bear.
Thomson was accompanied by her daughter Emma, 11, who said she had been inspired by the efforts of Malala Yousafzai, a teenage activist from Pakistan who was shot and nearly killed by Islamist militants for promoting girls’ education. “Obviously, this is in the interests of the Nigerian government to accept every aspect of our assistance,” Psaki said. “They conveyed that they were willing to do that yesterday and it continues to be in their interest to be as cooperative as possible.”
“Boko Haram said Allah told them to take the girls,” Emma said. “But I read about Malala, and she said that is not her Allah.” Carson said the United States could share satellite data to help track the movements of the fighters, which would mirror assistance it has contributed to the international hunt for elusive rebel leader Joseph Kony in eastern Africa.
Boko Haram rejects Western culture and seeks to create a pure Islamic state based on strict sharia law. The group has terrorized much of the Ni­ger­ian rural north for the past five years, killing at least 1,000 people in both Muslim and Christian areas. The Obama administration has been critical of the military approach of the Jonathan government, which is dominated by Christians from the country’s south, in dealing with the insurrection in the predominantly Muslim north.
The Islamic Society of North America condemned Boko Haram on Tuesday, calling its actions “disgusting and un-Islamic.” The Plainfield, Ind.-based organization called on Ni­ger­ian authorities to capture the kidnappers and bring them to justice. Washington has advocated a wider economic and social-justice agenda to counter the dogmatic Islamists and increase national loyalty among disaffected northern Nigerians. Jonathan has mostly ignored the advice, Carson and others said.
Even though many Westerners and Nigerians are outraged by the militants’ latest predations, the political, regional and religious pressures inside Nigeria are more complex. This helps to explain why Jonathan has tried to play down the kidnappings rather than actively pursue the perpetrators, and why other officials have cast doubt on the crime and criticized protest leaders. “There has always been a security response to these problems, and that security response generally has been very, very heavy-handed — brutal in many instances,” Carson said, which has led many Nigerians to regard the military as a threat nearly on par with the militants.
Despite his official welcome of the U.S. offer of assistance, it remained unclear whether civilian and military officials on the ground would cooperate with the Obama administration’s plan to send a team of experts and set up a “coordinating cell” at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja. Oronto Douglas, an adviser to Jonathan, said in an interview Wednesday that the Nigerian government is eager to accept Washington’s help in dealing with its growing extremism problem.
One of the factors in play, several experts said Tuesday, is the permanent tension between northern and southern Nigeria. Jonathan is a southerner, and many northerners are said to oppose his bid for reelection next year, which may have dampened his eagerness to intervene in the kidnappings there. “America has many years of dealing with terrorism,” he said. “This is very new in Nigeria, and in a new situation like this you have to seek allies, meet with people and draw on the experience and capacity of nations that have been dealing with terrorism for years.”
Experts said Jonathan was embarrassed by the kidnappings and failed to anticipate the domestic and international uproar they would cause. His wife cast doubt on whether the abductions really happened and reportedly ordered one protest leader arrested. The girls were abducted three weeks ago after they defied Boko Haram — which rejects education for girls and women — by showing up to take final exams at a secondary school that had been shuttered. Militants abducted about 250 girls, while another 50 reportedly managed to escape.
Another issue is the internal contradictions within the Ni­ger­ian army, which has waged a scorched-earth campaign against Boko Haram but also reportedly includes sympathizers of the group. Both soldiers and militants have been accused of human rights abuses, but none have been arrested or prosecuted. The students’ plight did not generate much attention until this week, after demonstrators in Nigeria criticized the government for not doing more to combat militancy. The protests marred the start of the World Economic Forum, which Nigeria, which has the continent’s largest economy, is hosting this week.
“The Nigerian army is large and strong enough to be effective in going after the kidnappers, but so far they haven’t,” said one expert on Africa at an international agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. Jonathan, he said, “was trying to treat this like business as usual, and suddenly it has turned into a major political debacle.” Supporters around the world took to Twitter to demand the students’ safe return, using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. First lady Michelle Obama added her voice to the cause Tuesday, tweeting a photo of herself looking sad and holding a white paper with the hashtag.
Ed O’Keefe and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. Douglas said the criticism leveled against Jonathan’s administration is unfounded, saying the “government is doing all it can in coordination with our allies to ensure that our daughters are brought back home.”
If political calls for greater assistance to Nigeria were to grow louder, the Obama administration would face a dilemma because of the poor human rights record of the country’s armed forces. Under a law championed by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the United States is barred from providing training and certain types of support to forces known to have committed abuses.