Nigeria's military said Thursday that soldiers found a Nigerian schoolgirl who was among the nearly 300 students kidnapped by extremist group Boko Haram in the town of Chibok in 2014.
Col. Sani Kukasheka Usman, an Army spokesman, identified the girl as Rakiya Abubakar and said she had a 6-month-old child. He said her identity was discovered when soldiers were interrogating some of the more than 1,000 suspects detained in army raids in the Sambisa Forest, the Associated Press reported.
The soldiers found Abubkar wandering near Algarno, a former Boko Haram stronghold, with her baby, according to Reuters.
In December, Nigeria’s president said his forces had crushed the Boko Haram extremist group and driven them out of their forest encampment but had yet to locate the scores of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls.
When the students were taken from their school in Chibok by the extremists nearly three years ago, the mass abductions sparked the global social media campaign called “Bring Back Our Girls."
More than 20 schoolgirls were released in October in a deal brokered by the Swiss government and the International Red Cross. Others have escaped or been rescued, but an estimated 200 are believed to remain missing.
Boko Haram, which means "Western Education Is Forbidden," has been around since the late 1990s. It declared solidarity with al-Qaeda in 2010 and launched a series of suicide bombings and attacks on Western facilities, including a vehicle-bomb attack in 2011 on the United Nations headquarters in Abuja that killed 23 people.
The group has sought to overthrow the Nigerian government and replace it with a regime based on Islamic law.
In 2014, under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram launched almost daily attacks on Christians, police, the media, schools and Muslims it perceived as collaborators, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center.
In 2015, it declared allegiance with the Islamic State. The group has also conducted attacks in neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
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