Pelosi: ‘We must and we will bring back’ Nigerian schoolgirls

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday reaffirmed Capitol Hill’s support for finding 219 Nigerian schoolgirls who were abducted from their dormitory beds by Boko Haram two years ago.

Alongside fellow members of Congress and girls who had escaped the 2014 kidnapping, the California Democrat pledged to locate the girls and bring them to safety.

“We must and we will bring back the girls,” Pelosi said during a press conference outside the Capitol to mark the two-year anniversary of their disappearance.

{mosads}“They are not forgotten,” she added. “On a regular almost daily basis, they are remembered in the Congress of the United States.”

This week, CNN released “proof of life” video footage of 15 of the girls taken last December from the town of Chibok, the first public images of them since being captured in the dead of night by the militant Islamist group.

Fifty-seven girls managed to escape or were let free.

One, who for protection goes by the pseudonym Saa, jumped from the back of a truck. Now she is attending a college in the U.S.

When she saw the video of her 15 classmates this week, she “started crying,” she told reporters on Thursday.

“I just wish I could talk to them. I just wish they could hear me,” she said, as she choked up and held back tears.  

“I just wanted to tell the world that let’s up not give up. Let’s not forget about this curse.”

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), who has repeatedly drawn attention to the girls’s plight, said she believes Boko Haram “is smart enough” to keep the girls alive, if only as a bargaining chip.  

“I know that they are holding those girls for the expressed purpose of bargaining,” she said. “I believe that’s true because I have not seen or heard of a mass grave where all of them could be, and I have not heard or seen a little Chibok girl who has come to anyone and said ‘I am a Chibok girl, I am one of the ones who was kidnapped.’”

The schoolgirls are among the thousands of people who have been killed or kidnapped by Boko Haram in recent years. The group is now considered the deadliest terrorist organization on the planet.

“The Chibok girls have now come to represent the hundreds and maybe even thousands of young women and girls who have been kidnapped since by Boko Haram,” said Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa.

On Thursday, Smith suggested the U.S. ought to provide better assistance to Nigerian security forces to help them fight the organization’s growth.

“They need capacity, capability, night vision goggles, to take this to Boko Haram,” Smith said. “We’re doing some. I would suggest we’re not going enough.”

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) told reporters that Washington ought to support tougher and more proactive negotiations between Boko Haram and the Nigerian government in Abuja.

“It has to be a point where there is no stopping in the intensity of negotiation, no pause and no let up on Nigeria, but you help them with resources so they can be in the forefront of getting these girls back,” she said.

Jackson Lee has also pushed for the U.S. to create a $458 million fund for victims of Boko Haram’s violence, which would use money forfeited by former Nigerian military leader Sani Abacha.