MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Nigeria’s military said it had rescued 338 captives from villages near the Sambisa Forest, a Boko Haram stronghold since troops forced the Islamist insurgents into a retreat from swaths of the country this year.

In the early hours of Tuesday, troops descended on two dusty villages on the fringes of a former game reserve that has become the insurgency’s last redoubt, the army said. Commanders said 30 militants were killed and machine guns, ammunition and cutlasses were recovered in a battle that eventually freed the captives.

“We have continued to make progress in our fight against Boko Haram terrorists,” Army Chief of Staff Tukur Yusuf Buratai said on Wednesday. He said troops killed some 30 militants and confiscated arms and ammunition during the Tuesday raid.

Of the rescued captives, 192 were children, eight were men and 138 were women, but they didn’t include any of the 276 schoolgirls abducted from a boarding school in Chibok last year, an incident that drew international attention to Boko Haram’s insurgency.

“We are happy to have rescued these hostages, we hope to do more,” Mr. Buratai said.

The newly freed captives join hundreds more women and girls rescued this year from Boko Haram encampments in the same forest, where many said they were abused and sexually assaulted by young fighters.

Some of those women have received counseling and vocational training at high-security government camps.

But many hundreds more remain captive, Nigerian officials say. More than 25,000 people have died during Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency against the Nigerian state. More than a million have fled their homes and many more have lost faith in Nigeria’s government to quell the violence.

These concerns helped propel President Muhammadu Buhari to victory in March overGoodluck Jonathan , whose party had never lost a national vote. After five months in office, Mr. Buhari, a retired general who briefly ran Nigeria as a military dictator in the 1980s, appears to have consolidated battlefield gains Mr. Jonathan set in motion. Boko Haram now holds just a few corners of Sambisa, rather than the Belgium-size chunk of rural Nigeria it controlled at the beginning of this year.

But the insurgency has reverted to stealthier, still deadly tactics such as sending female suicide bombers into crowded markets in northern cities like Maiduguri, where Boko Haram was founded. Almost daily attacks have killed hundreds of people in recent months in Nigeria as well as its neighbors, Cameroon, Niger and Chad, which stepped in to help fight the insurgency this year.

Mr. Buhari has appealed to the U.S. for increased military support as well. So far the U.S. has conducted drone surveillance flights and otherwise supported the multinational force battling Boko Haram around Lake Chad.

“The apparent use of children—particularly young girls—to commit these attacks is especially heinous, and it provides yet more examples of the horrific measures Boko Haram is willing to take to terrorize civilians in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin region,” the U.S. State Department wrote Tuesday of attacks last week in Maiduguri and Yola, a city at the edge of Boko Haram’s stronghold.

Copyright: Wall Street Journal 2015

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