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Boko Haram Threatens to Kidnap More Young Women

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Three weeks after kidnapping hundreds of girls from a school in northern Nigeria, the terrorist group Boko Haram is threatening to attack more schools and abduct more young women.

"There is a market for selling humans," Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said Monday in a video obtained by Agence France-Presse. "Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women."

U.S. intelligence officials are working with Nigerian authorities to help locate the girls.

"(The U.S.) will do everything possible to support the Nigerian government to return these young women to their homes and to hold the perpetrators to justice," Secretary of State John Kerry vowed.

The news comes as international pressure mounts to rescue the girls, with protests flooding social media and the streets of U.S. Cities.

"These girls are rare. They're heroes," freelance journalist Alexis Okeowo said.

They're heroes because in northern Nigeria, merely going to school can make students the target of terrorists.

Boko Haram has been working for years to turn Africa's most populous nation into an Islamic state. The group's name literally means "western education is evil."

"They believe that in the schools, in the education system in Nigeria, that Islamic Sharia law must be the foundation of all education and they feel that Western education -- math, science and biology -- is a sin," CBN News International Reporter George Thomas explained.

"And they believe that teaching Islam and the Koran should be the principle of all education in Nigeria," he said.

For the girl's parents, the situation is a nightmare.

"The hope of finding my daughter, or our daughters, lies in the hands of the government and the security men because, on our own, we cannot do anything," Martha Ndirpaya, the mother of one of the missing girls, said.

Boko Haram may have already shipped some of the girls across the border to sell them into Muslim marriages. The terrorists originally kidnapped nearly 300, but police say 53 escaped.

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About The Author

Heather
Sells

Heather Sells covers wide-ranging stories for CBN News that include religious liberty, ministry trends, immigration, and education. She’s known for telling personal stories that capture the issues of the day, from the border sheriff who rescues migrants in the desert to the parents struggling with a child that identifies as transgender. In the last year, she has reported on immigration at the Texas border, from Washington, D.C., in advance of the Dobbs abortion case, at crisis pregnancy centers in Massachusetts, and on sexual abuse reform at the annual Southern Baptist meeting in Anaheim