Nigeria’s military has freed more than 1,000 people held captive in the northeastern part of the country by the jihadi group Boko Haram, CNN.com and the Associated Press have reported.
The majority of the hostages consisted of women and children and were rescued from four villages in the Bama area of Borno state, military spokesman Big. Gen. Texas Chukwu told the AP. Some young men had been forced to become Boko Haram fighters.
CNN reported that it wasn’t certain whether the Nigerian military had actually had seen conflict with Boko Haram during the rescue and people had been injured or lost their lives, or whether the villages “were so remote that the hostages had no access to security forces.”
Chukwu told the AP that the Nigerian military’s operation was performed in connection with allies from the Multinational Joint Task Force consisting of military forces from Chad, Cameroon and Benin and Niger.
During its nine years of insurgency in Nigeria and surrounding countries, Boko Haram has been responsible for the abductions of thousands of people. The Nigerian military claims it rescued more than 1,100 people held in the Lake Chad region near Cameroon in February.
