US Democratic presidential front-runner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed her sorrow for the hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram Takfiri terrorists.
“My heart aches for the hundreds of boys and girls who have been kidnapped by Boko Haram over the years,” Clinton said on Thursday, marking the two-year anniversary of the mass abduction.
"No child should have to endure these atrocities,” she added.
Clinton, reproaching Boko Haram’s acts of violence, linked the kidnapping to larger problems facing women around the world.
“[It is] a stark reminder of the work we must do to advance equality for women and girls,” she said. “Locating the missing girls is essential for improving gender equality worldwide and discouraging future terrorism.”
It was US First Lady Michelle Obama who put the spotlight on the girl victims by sharing a photo (shown below) in 2014 that went viral, bringing international attention to the struggles West Africa faces from Takfiri terrorist groups, which had been allegedly sponsored by the US and its allies.
In April 2014, Boko Haram militants kidnapped a total of 276 girls from their boarding school in the northeastern town of Chibok in the troubled Borno sate. Several dozen girls escaped afterwards, but the fate of 219 others is still unknown.
An estimated 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million others made homeless since the beginning of the Boko Haram bloody militancy in Nigeria in 2009.
The militants have recently pledged allegiance to the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group, which is primarily operating in Syria and Iraq.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden,” has spread its attacks from northeastern Nigeria, its traditional stronghold, to the neighboring countries of Chad, Niger and Cameroon.