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Nigeria Army Rescues Abducted Boys

By Stefan J. Bos, Special Correspondent Worthy News

(Worthy News) – Nigeria’s army said Friday it had rescued all 344 schoolboys who were kidnapped a week earlier by Islamic militants in the nation’s troubled northwest.

Dozens of the freed children arrived back home on Friday, many of them barefoot and wrapped in blankets after their week-long ordeal.

Reporters said the boys, dressed in dusty clothes, looked dazed and weary but otherwise well as they got off buses in the city of Katsina.

Within hours – before many had met their waiting parents – they were whisked to a reception with President Muhammadu Buhari. He had come under mounting pressure to free them and deal with insecurity in the north.

One boy, who did not give his name, said the captors had told him to describe them as members of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, although he suspected they were armed bandits. “They beat us morning, every night. We suffered a lot. They only gave us food once a day and water twice a day,” he told Nigeria’s Arise television.

Parents expressed relief to see their children return. They had feared the boys might be radicalized or held for years.

Boko Haram, which means “Western education is forbidden,” reportedly raided the all-boys school in Nigeria’s town of Kankara in northwestern Katsina as part of its Islamic campaign.

The abduction echoed Boko Haram’s 2014 kidnapping of more than 270 schoolgirls in the northeastern town of Chibok. The attack gave rise to a global #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Six years later, about half the girls have been found or freed.

Others were married off to fighters, while some are assumed to be dead. Many were forced to abandon their faith in Christ and turn to Islam, video footage and other sources showed.

Boko Haram has fought the Nigerian state since 2009 through attacks that included targeting Christians, and others deemed dangerous to its Islamic views.