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by Our Foreign Desk
MILITARY spokesman Colonel Sani Usman announced yesterday that the army is moving 200 girls and 93 women from the north-eastern Sambisa Forest to an unidentified place of refuge.
Col Usman said that none of the girls were among those kidnapped by Boko Haram extremists in Chibok last year.
But he backtracked later, insisting that he was not categorically saying that none of the Chibok girls were among those rescued.
They still needed to be questioned to determine their identities.
The girls and women were liberated on Tuesday in a military offensive in the forest that led to the destruction of four Boko Haram camps.
An intelligence officer said that Boko Haram had used some women as armed human shields, a first line of defence who fired at troops.
Col Usman said that many of the freed captives were traumatised as a result of their ordeal and the military would fly in medical and intelligence teams to check their physical and mental health.
“The processing is continuing. It involves a lot of things because most of them are traumatised and you have got to put them in a psychological frame of mind to extract information from them,” he added.
Col Usman said that military operations were continuing in the forest.“Sambisa Forest is a large expanse of land, so what we were able to get is four out of several terrorist camps in the forest,” he said.
The mass kidnapping from Chibok brought Boko Haram to global attention and failure to rescue them aroused condemnation of Nigeria’s government and military.
The military largely stood by last year as Boko Haram took over dozens of towns and declared a large swathe of north-eastern Borno state an Islamic caliphate.
That changed when a multinational offensive led by Chad began at the end of January.
Nigerian armed forces claim now to have driven the extremists out of all towns with help from troops from Chad and Niger, while Cameroonian soldiers have been guarding borders to prevent the militants from escaping.
Scores of abducted girls, women and men have been freed or escaped from Boko Haram in the process.
