Boko Haram kidnapping: Where are the girls and why have they not been found?

Islamic Extremism

Credit: AFP PHOTO / BOKO HARAM

The Nigerian government is under pressure to find hundreds of teenage girls who were kidnapped a month ago. Where are the girls and why have they not been found? Anand Naidoo and the Heat explore these questions and many more on this episode of The Heat.

An Islamist Militant group has kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in Nigeria. Boko Haram has released a video which shows some of the missing girls praying after apparently converting to Islam. The group’s leader says the girls will be held until all imprisoned militias have been freed. The international community, with the help of social media, is now putting pressure on the Nigerian government to find the missing school girls. Shreya Sen reports.

Anand Naidoo is joined by Adotei Akwei, Managing Director for Government relations for Amnesty International USA for an in-depth look at the motivations behind this kidnapping.

Boko Haram has received a lot of media attention after the kidnapping of more than 200 school girls in Nigeria, but who are the people running Boko Haram? Why have they kidnapped the girls? What can the international community do to help? To discuss all this, Anand Naidoo is joined by former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell.

Recent years have seen a rise in extremist groups in Africa. Apart from Boko Haram in Nigeria, there’s Al-Shabaab in Somalia and an Al-Qaeda offshoot organization known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. What has made Africa a hot bed for Islamic extremism and are these groups working together for a common goal? To answer those questions and many more, Anand Naidoo is joined by Zainab Chaudry, the Chair of the Maryland outreach office for the Council on American-Islamic relations.