United States is not considerinng sending armed forces to Abuja, the country said yesterday.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US embassy in Abuja would help assemble a team of technical experts, including military and law enforcement personnel skilled in intelligence, investigations, hostage negotiating, information sharing and victim assistance. The US was not considering sending armed forces, Carney said.
John Kerry, the secretary of state, said Washington had been in touch with Abuja since “day one”. It rebuffed US offers of help until Tuesday when Kerry spoke with Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan.
“I think now the complications that have arisen have convinced everybody that there needs to be a greater effort,” Kerry said at a state department news conference. “And it will begin immediately. I mean, literally, immediately.”
It would be recalled that the United States and Britain have offered military and technical support to Nigeria to hunt down the Islamist group which has abducted a new batch of schoolgirls, piling pressure on the Nigerian authorities to find and free the victims.
President Barack Obama led a mounting international outcry on Tuesday and said Nigeria’s government had accepted help from US military and law enforcement officials to pursue Boko Haram militants.
Gunmen believed to be from the group kidnapped eight more girls, aged between eight and 15, in an overnight raid on a village in the sect’s stronghold in north-eastern Borno state on Monday. It was already holding 257 girls from a raid on a school on 15 April.
Obama said the US was doing its utmost to help resolve the “terrible situation” but stopped short of offering to send troops – in contrast to Britain, which is prepared to send special forces and intelligence gathering aircraft.
“In the short term our goal is obviously to help the international community, and the Nigerian government, as a team to do everything we can to recover these young ladies,” Obama told NBC. “But we’re also going to have to deal with the broader problem of organisations like this that … can cause such havoc in people’s day-to-day lives.”
The president said Boko Haram was one of the world’s worst terrorist organisations. “I can only imagine what the parents are going through,” added Obama, a father of two daughters aged 15 and 12.