Monday, the White House confirmed that the United States is helping Nigeria in their effort to find and free the abducted schoolgirls.

According to Amnesty International, several hundred schoolgirls – both Christian and Muslim – between the ages of 16 and 18 were abducted at gunpoint on April 14 from their rooms at the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria, where they had been sleeping.

The armed extremist group Boko Haram, which roughly translates to “Western Education is Sin,” claimed responsibility for these mass kidnappings and threatened to sell these young girls into sex slavery or forced “marriages” to members of their group.

“I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” a man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video first obtained by Agence France-Presse. (Keep in mind everyone that I’m sure the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world would agree that kidnapping young girls and selling them into slavery – no matter what you say “Allah” tells you is absolutely un-Islamic.)

White House spokesman Jay Carney Monday denounced the kidnappings “as an outrage and terrible tragedy.” He also expressed that “The president has been briefed several times, and his national security team continues to monitor the situation there closely. The State Department has been in regular touch with the Nigerian government about what we might do to help support its efforts to find and free these young women,” said Carney.

 

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. embassy in Abuja was prepared to form an interdisciplinary team that “could provide expertise on intelligence, investigations and hostage negotiations, how to facilitate information sharing and provide victim assistance.”

The team would include U.S. military personnel, law enforcement officials trained in investigations and hostage negotiations.This announcements follow widespread condemnation from the international community that the government has not done enough to rescue the girls.