Abducted girls in Nigeria reportedly sold as brides to Boko Haram militants for $12

HUNDREDS of school girls kidnapped in Nigeria are reportedly being forced to marry their Islamic extremist abductors, as their fate remains in limbo.

More than two weeks ago, more than 200 girls were abducted by the Boko Haram terrorist network from the Chibok Girls Secondary School.

About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from their captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remain missing, according to the school"s principal Asabe Kwambura.

They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.

The failure to rescue the girls is a massive embarrassment to Nigeria"s govement and the military, which has failed to stop the Boko Haram militants.

The militants are also understood to be negotiating over the students" fate and demanding an unspecified ransom for their release.

The news of negotiations comes as parents say the girls are being sold into marriage with the militants.

The students are being paid 2,000 naira ($12) to marry the fighters, according to Halite Aliyu of the Boo-Yobe People"s Forum.

She said the parents" information about mass weddings is coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria"s border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram is known to have hideouts.

"The latest reports are that they have been taken across the borders, some to Cameroon and Chad,” Aliyu said.

"Some of them have been married off to insurgents. A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off,” community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok, the town where the girls were abducted, told the BBC Hausa Service.

Outrage over the failure to rescue the girls is growing and hundreds of women braved heavy rain to march today to Nigeria"s National Assembly to protest lack of action over the students. Hundreds more also marched in Kano, Nigeria"s second city in the north.

"The leaders of both houses said they will do all in their power but we are saying two weeks already have past, we want action now,” said activist Mercy Asu Abang.

"We want our girls to come home alive — not in body bags,” she said.

Dubbed "a million woman march” and promoted on Twitter under #BringBackOurGirls, several hundred women and men, mostly dressed in red, marched through the rain towards the National Assembly carrying placards that read "Find Our Daughters.”

Singer Mary J. Blige is one of many people who have joined the social media campaign.

It's been two weeks since the kidnapping of 234 Nigerian girls and they still aren't home #bringbackourgirls pic.twitter.com/8OiC5GJPrc — Mary J. Blige (@maryjblige) April 30, 2014

Protesting to save them ... women attend a demonstration calling on the govement to rescue kidnapped schoolgirls. Picture: Gbemiga Olamikan Source: AP

Protest organiser Hadiza Bala Usman told AFP that "the protest will be sustained until the girls are released by their captors. We hope to continue the protest on Thursday in Abuja, and on Monday in Lagos.”

"We will also demand to see the president if we don"t get any commitment from govement to rescue these girls,” she added.

The abduction of the girls on April 14 at gunpoint from their school in the northeast has outraged Africa"s most populous nation.

"The govement has to understand that we are not going to allow this silence to continue,” Usman earlier told AFP.

But time appears to be running out for some of them.

A message from the abductors also claimed that two of the girls have died from snake bites, according to a civic leader.

Fighting for their rights ... a woman holds a placard outside the goveor's office in northe Nigerian city of Kano calling for the release of school girls abducted by Boko Haram Islamists. Picture: Aminu Abubakar Source: AFP

The message was sent to a member of a presidential committee mandated last year to mediate a ceasefire with the Islamic extremists, said the civic leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak about the talks.

The Nigerian military"s lack of progress in rescuing the girls indicates that large parts of the country remain beyond the control of the govement.

Until the kidnappings, the air force had been mounting near-daily bombing raids since mid-January on the Sambisa Forest and mountain caves bordering Chad.

Aliyu said that in north-easte Nigeria "life has become nasty, short and brutish. We are living in a state of anarchy.”