Boko Haram releases video of abducted girls.

Boko Haram releases video of 136 of the missing girls.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said the children would be held until all imprisoned militants had been freed.

Nigeria's interior minister says this demand is "absurd".

I am relieved that at least some of them are still together in one place, meaning they have friends with them.  I hope this means they have not been "sold" to "husbands".

Still, the offer to swap only applies to the non-Muslim girls, and they may be under pressure to convert...

Three of the girls - wearing full-length cloaks - are shown speaking in the 27-minute video, obtained by French news agency AFP.

Two girls say they were Christian and have converted to Islam, while the other says she is Muslim.

"These girls, these girls you occupy yourselves with... we have indeed liberated them. These girls have become Muslims," Abubakar Shekau says in the video.

He said his offer to swap the girls for imprisoned militants only referred to the children who had not converted to Islam."

Liberated... I cannot wrap my minds around this.  Liberated through kidnapping?  Liberated through coerced conversion?  How is that liberation?  Then again, the U.S. spent the twenty-oughts "liberating" countries by bombing them to smithereens and killing hundreds of thousands.

This could still all turn bad, but to me it is a hopeful sign that these children have not all been split up and sold off already.  (Though, of course, there's no guarantee they haven't been sold to members of Boko Haram.)  And perhaps the release of the video shows that international pressure and assistance to Nigeria's government is having a positive effect.

© cai

3:21 PM PT: I see now that there were two previous diaries on this: Kidnapped Girls Forcibly Converted to Islam by Noisy Democrat and Boko Haram shows video tape of kidnapped Nigerian girls, offers to trade for prisoners by Hounddog.  Should I delete mine?

Edited to add: More info from a linked BBC article on the origins of Boko Haram:

It made a similar threat in May 2013, when it released a video, saying it had taken women and children - including teenage girls - hostage in response to the arrest of its members' wives and children. There was later a prison swap, with both sides releasing the women and children.

So it seems that taking prisoners and then trading them is a tactic that has worked for Boko Haram in the past.  Does this mean it's likely to work now?  Or is there too much world attention for that to happen this time?