Chibok Girls Swapped for 5 Boko Haram Commanders

Five Boko Haram commanders were exchanged for the 82 Chibok girls that were freed on Saturday after being held captive for three years by Boko Haram Islamic extremists.

A Nigerian government official disclosed this on Sunday, AP claimed in a report.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to reporters on the matter.

Neither Nigeria’s government nor Boko Haram, which has links to the Islamic State group, have given any details about the exchange.

Security analysts have, however, been speculating about what the girls’ release means for the group’s long-term political future.

They said there was no doubt that the deal was negotiated with the Nigerian Government in a position of strength.

They also believe Boko Haram has lost “a crucial bargaining chip” with the girls’ release.

According to them, Even as Boko Haram continues amassing fighters — recruiting over 2,000 children in 2016 alone — and spreading fear through its online propaganda campaign, since late last year structural weaknesses within the group have begun to show.

They pointed to the leadership spill between Abubakar Shekau, the successor to the group’s spiritual founder, Ustaz Mohammad Yussef, and the group’s spokesman, Abu Musab Al-Barnawi, which has led to factional in-fighting between the two camps as an indication that the group is now much less of a threat than it used to be.

They also referred to the UK Foreign Office updated in-country travel advisory, released on Sunday, as pointer to the likely precarious position the terrorist group is in.

The advisory alerted foreign nationals to the receipt of new information that Boko Haram was “actively planning to kidnap Western foreign workers along the Kumshe-Banki axis” near the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

Analysts say this development suggests that Boko Haram is now searching for an explicitly Western kidnapping target to boost its global profile and this would indicate that a crucial psychological tool and bargaining chip has been lost in the release of the Chibok schoolgirls.

They also envisage that if Boko Haram’s increasingly splintering membership is shifting the emphasis away from large-scale military operations towards low-level kidnappings, then the group’s relative strategic position is perhaps in even worse shape than previously thought.

Meanwhile, President Muhammadu Buhari expressed joy at a meeting with the 82 Chibok schoolgirls, at his residence in Abuja, on Sunday.

“The president was delighted to receive them and he promised that all that is needed to be done to reintegrate them into the society will be done,” his special adviser on media, Femi Adesina said. “He promised that the presidency will personally supervise their rehabilitation.”

The young women have been handed over to government officials who will supervise their re-entry into society, Adesina further said.

Adesina, thereafter, announced the president was leaving same day for more medical checkups in London.

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