MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — Extremists have abducted 91
more people, including toddlers as young as 3, in weekend attacks on
villages in Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday, providing fresh evidence of
the military’s failure to curb an Islamic uprising and the government’s
inability to provide security.
The kidnappings come less than
three months after more than 200 schoolgirls were taken in a mass
abduction that embarrassed Nigeria’s government and military because of
their slow response. Those girls are still being held captive.
The most recent victims included 60 girls and women, some of whom were married, and 31 boys, witnesses
said.
A local official confirmed the abductions, but security forces denied them.
There
was no way to safely and independently confirm the report from
Kummabza, 150 kilometers (95 miles) from Maiduguri, capital of Borno
state and headquarters of a military state of emergency that has failed
to curtail near-daily attacks by Boko Haram fighters.
Vigilante
leader Aji Khalil said Tuesday the abductions took place Saturday in an
attack that killed four villagers. Khalil lives in Maiduguri but gets
reports daily from other vigilante groups that have had some success in
repelling Boko Haram with primitive weapons.
A senior councilor
from the village’s Damboa local government told The Associated Press
that abductions had occurred but spoke on condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to give information to reporters. He said the
reports came from elderly survivors of the attack who had walked some 25
kilometers (15 miles) to the relative safety of other villages.
An
intelligence officer with Nigeria’s Department of State Security also
said there had been a mass abduction, but he said it occurred in
Kummabza and three nearby villages between June 13 and 15, and that no
one knows the actual number abducted. He also spoke on the condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
There was no way to reconcile the confusion, which also surrounded the first mass abduction in mid-April.

Several
prominent Nigerians questioned whether those abductions had taken
place, including first lady Patience Jonathan, who claimed the reports
were fabricated to discredit her husband’s administration.
Last
week, a presidential committee investigating the April kidnappings
stressed that they did happen and clarified the number of students who
have been kidnapped. It said there were 395 students at the school — 119
who escaped during the siege of the school and another 57 who escaped
in the first couple of days of their abduction, leaving 219 unaccounted
for.
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith met earlier this month with one of the girls who escaped.
"Almost
two months later, clearly she was still traumatized — you could hear it
in her quivering voice and see it in her eyes. Yet she spoke mostly of
her deep concern for her friends and classmates still in captivity and
pleaded for their immediate rescue," he said in a statement issued
Tuesday.
But Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, also quoted
testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee last week by another
former U.S. ambassador, Robin Renee Sanders, who warned that "Nigeria is
in the beginning of a long war. … There is no easy fix."
John
Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria who is an analyst with the
Council of Foreign Relations, predicted that kidnappings would continue
because, for Boko Haram, the strategy has been "remarkably successful:
It focuses attention on the shortcomings of the Nigerian government."
The
latest abductions were the subject of speculation at a daily rally
Tuesday in the capital of Abuja, an ongoing protest to keep attention on
the prolonged trauma of the girls from the village of Chibok. Various
speakers worried about the fate of the new victims.
The rally to
"Bring Back Our Girls" is organized by a group of women from all tribes,
religions and ages — an unusual display of unity in a country divided
about equally between the mainly Muslim north and predominantly
Christian south.
Boko Haram — the nickname means "Western
education is sinful" — wants to enforce Islamic law throughout the
country of 170 million.
The new kidnappings also show that
international efforts to coordinate security along Nigeria’s border with
Cameroon have stalled, said Jacob Zenn, author of a book about Boko
Haram. Sightings of groups of girls assumed to be from Chibok have come
from neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon, he said.
A strategy to
rescue the girls is at an impasse. Nigeria’s military has said it knows
where they are but fears their abductors would kill them if military
action is taken.
Boko Haram has been demanding the release of
detained members, but President Goodluck Jonathan has said he will not
consider a swap.
Zenn said the longer the situation drags on,
"Boko Haram is more likely to decide to use the girls for forced
marriages instead of as bargaining chips."
This year, the Boko
Haram insurgents have embarked on a two-pronged strategy — bombing in
cities and a scorched-earth policy in rural areas where they are
devastating villages.
On Monday, an explosion at a medical college
in the northern city of Kano killed at least eight people and wounded
12, police said. It was the third bomb blast in four months in Kano,
Nigeria’s second-largest city.
On Saturday, Boko Haram fighters
attacked four villages near Chibok, witnesses said, and 33 villagers,
six vigilantes and about two dozen Boko Haram fighters were killed.
The
group evolved five years ago from an Islamic sect that preached against
the corruption that keeps most Nigerians impoverished despite their
country’s oil wealth. Those efforts expanded into a violent movement
that initially targeted government and security officials, Christians
and Muslim critics but now attacks indiscriminately.
___
Faul reported from Lagos, Nigeria.