Nigeria to ‘redouble’ efforts to bring back rest of Chibok girls

Nigeria will double down in its efforts to bring home the rest of the more than 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014, President Muhammadu Buhari said on Wednesday.
“We shall redouble our efforts to bring the rest back home,” Buhari said while meeting 21 Chibok girls which were released by Boko Haram last week after talks with the government brokered by Switzerland and the International Red Cross. 
Nigerian Army said Wednesday that Boko Haram terrorists have overrun a remote military camp in the northeast, leaving 13 soldiers wounded and an unknown number missing.
The attack on Gashigar, on the border with Niger, is the third reported attack on the military after months of a lull during which the terrorists hit soft civilian targets.
Army spokesman Col. Sani Kukasheka Usman called the attack a “temporary setback” committed by “remnants of Boko Haram” that forced the soldiers to retreat. An operation is in progress to find the missing troopers and “clear the Boko Haram terrorists at the general area,” his statement said.
It is believed the attack is by a splinter from Boko Haram that calls itself the West Africa Province of the Islamic State. 
Militants named a new caliph of its only franchise in sub-Saharan Africa in August, provoking a struggle with Boko Haram’s longtime leader Abubakar Shekau. A battle of words on social media indicated the dispute is over Shekau’s indiscriminate killing of Muslims.
The group loyal to Shekau negotiated — with the Swiss government and International Committee of the Red Cross acting as intermediaries for Nigeria’s government — last Thursday’s release of 21 Chibok girls, the first such negotiated settlement.
Boko Haram’s 7-year-old uprising has killed more than 20,000 people, forced some 2.6 million from their homes and left tens of thousands facing famine-like conditions, according to aid agencies and the UN.

Source: Arab News