‘Totally unjustified decision to retreat from the noble fight puts even more people in jeopardy’
By 
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
Every day, Tassie Ghata, director of a non-denominational Christian ministry in Nigeria, must swallow the numbing fear her family faces while practicing their faith in a nation where kidnappings and slayings of Christians number in the thousands each year.
“When my daughter was six years old, she came to me and said, ‘Mommy, when Boko Haram or the kidnappers come to our house and want to kill us, how will they do it?’” she told a gathering of international religious freedom advocates in Washington, D.C., late last month.
Ghata recalled trying to calm her daughter’s fears while knowing they were all too real – that her daughter and other girls regularly discussed the deadly Islamic militant group’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in 2014, many of whom are Christian. Only roughly half ever escaped and returned home.
“This is the kind of life we are living in Nigeria,” Ghata told a group of dignitaries and leading human rights activists at the International Religious Freedom Summit gathering in Washington on Jan. 31. She went on to describe her own harrowing abduction in January 2020 by Boko Haram militants who threatened to rape her but ultimately let her go after three days.