The following appeared in a Chicago Tribune editorial:
It wasn't the first time or the last. It was only the most brazen.
Armed terrorists stormed a boarding school in northern Nigeria on April 14, rousting hundreds of girls from their beds at gunpoint and hauling them away on trucks.
"I abducted your girls," Adubakar Shekau, the leader of the militant Islamist sect Boko Haram, said in a videotaped statement almost three weeks later. "I will sell them on the market, by Allah."
Smaller raids have been going on for at least a year, including one on another school in February in which 30 to 40 girls were seized, according to Amnesty International. As worldwide protests demanded the return of the 276 missing since April, another eight were grabbed from their homes overnight Tuesday.
Shekau said the girls, most of them 15 to 18, would be sold as "wives." Sex slaves, in other words.
Westerners are aghast. Nigeria's government, not so much. The girls' families say security forces have never reached out to them and that there are no visible signs of a military search, even around known Boko Haram strongholds.
Those complaints ring true. How else could a convoy large enough to carry hundreds of prisoners simply disappear?
From afar, it looks like the government's role has been to tally the missing: First reported as "dozens," the number was revised down to eight within two days, then started climbing after angry contradictions from parents and the school's principal. As of Tuesday, it stood at 276. Another 53 had escaped.
On Sunday, almost three weeks after the girls disappeared, President Goodluck Jonathan tried to quiet rising global outrage by publicly pledging that the girls would be rescued — even as he admitted he didn't have a clue where to find them.
He complained that the girls' families aren't cooperating, saying police don't know the names of all of the missing. It's the sort of dissembling response Nigerian villagers have come to expect from their government in dealing with Boko Haram.
The sect's name is local shorthand for "Western education is sinful;" its much longer name, in Arabic, means "People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad." Its goal is to create an Islamic state in northeastern Nigeria.
Any activity associated with Western society is forbidden. Wearing nontraditional garb. Voting. Vices such as alcohol, tobacco and soccer. Attending a secular school — especially for females. "Girls, you should go and get married," Shekau said in the video.
Founded in 2002 by cleric Mohammed Yusuf, Boko Haram carried out a rash of attacks on churches, schools, banks and government buildings before police seized its headquarters in July 2009. Hundreds of fighters were jailed; Yusuf was killed and his body displayed on television.
The group signaled its resurgence with a dramatic prison break in 2010, and more attacks followed.
In 2011, a U.S. congressional report linked Boko Haram to al-Qaida. The group's targets have included soldiers, politicians and Christians, along with Muslims who are believed to be aligned with the government.
Villagers say the Nigerian security forces often show up after the violence is over and don't bother to investigate. They also accuse police of extrajudicial executions of suspected Boko Haram sympathizers. Human Rights Watch has said the military kills almost as many as Boko Haram. Nigerians are afraid of both.
They have little faith in the government's commitment to finding their missing children.
So they've taken to the streets, and to the Internet, to plead for international help. On Tuesday, the White House said it was sending a team to advise Nigerian security forces on intelligence, investigations and hostage negotiations, an approach that hopefully underscores the message that Nigeria's government needs to step up.
Social media can magnify that message, especially now. It's a safe bet that Boko Haram isn't watching .BringBackOurGirls trend on Twitter, but the Nigerian government is keenly aware that the world is watching.
From Wednesday through Friday, Abuja hosts a World Economic Forum for Africa, meant to showcase the country's potential for foreign investment. Oil-rich Nigeria is the largest economy on a continent ripe with opportunity.
That picture is sure to be marred by protests over the still-missing girls. Who wants to invest in a lawless country whose government responds passively to the mass abduction of hundreds of children?
"Wherever these girls are, we'll get them out," the nation's president said, three weeks after they disappeared. He hasn't given anyone a reason to believe him.