First Rescued Chibok Girl: ‘I Just Want to Go Home’
ICC Note: Amina Ali, the only one of the Chibok girls that has been rescued since their abduction two years ago, stated recently in an exclusive interview that she just wants to go home. Since her rescue, she has been staying in a house in Nigeria’s capital for a “restoration process”. Amina said that she is not sure about going back to school yet, and that she really just wants to return to her home in Chibok but doesn’t know when that will happen. The Chibok girls were abducted by Boko Haram from their secondary school back in April, 2014. This abduction sparked international outrage and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. However, two years later, 219 of the original 276 girls are still missing. The Nigerian government has claimed that they are working to get these girls back from captivity, but the parents of the girls are growing increasingly impatient with how long it has taken. Many of these Chibok girls are Christian since Chibok is a predominantly Christian village and Boko Haram targets Christians with their violence in accordance with their jihadist agenda.
08/17/2016, Nigeria (Reuters) – The first of more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls to be rescued from Boko Haram after two years in captivity in northeast Nigeria said on Tuesday in her first interview that she just wants to go home.
Amina Ali and her four-month-old baby were rescued in May near Damboa in Borno state by soldiers and a civilian vigilante group, more than two years after being kidnapped by the Islamist militants from a school in Chibok in northeast Nigeria.
After her rescue sparked a blaze of global media attention, the 21-year-old and her child have since been hidden away in a house in the capital Abuja for what the Nigerian government has called a “restoration process”.
“I just want to go home – I don’t know about school,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an exclusive interview.
“I will decide about school when I get back, but I have no idea when I will be going home,” Ali said, speaking softly while staring at the ground.
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