CHIBOK, Nigeria — A week after Islamic extremists stormed a remote boarding school in northeast Nigeria, more than 200 girls and young women remain missing despite a ‘‘hot pursuit’’ by security forces and an independent search by desperate fathers who headed into a dangerous forest to find their daughters.
At Chibok, the scene of the attack, weeping parents cried on Monday, begging the kidnappers to ‘‘have mercy on our daughters,’’ and for the government to rescue them. ‘‘I have not seen my dear daughter, she is a good girl,’’ cried Musa Muka, whose 17-year-old Martha was taken away.
Although at least 200 remain missing, dozens of the students managed to escape their captors, jumping from the back of an open truck after they were kidnapped in the pre-dawn hours of last Tuesday or by running away and hiding in the dense forest.
The mass abduction is a major embarrassment for Nigeria’s military, which had announced last week that security forces had rescued all but eight of those kidnapped — and then was forced to retract the statement.
The Nigerian Air Force has halted what were near-daily air bombardments of the forest — presumably because of the kidnapped students. The extremists have abducted handfuls of students in recent months but this mass kidnapping is unprecedented.
Nigeria’s military is already confronted by mounting criticism over its failure to curb the five-year-old Islamic uprising despite having draconian powers under an 11-month state of emergency in three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the country.