Yola, Nigeria: Their faces were gaunt, eyes infected, hair tinted orange and stomachs distended from malnutrition. They looked bewildered, lost, broken. But the girls were alive and free.
They were among a group of 275 children and women rescued from Boko Haram extremists, the first to arrive at a refugee camp after a three-day journey to safety, brought by Nigeria's military.
They came from the Sambisa Forest, the last stronghold of the Islamic extremists, where the Nigerian military said it has rescued more than 677 girls and women and destroyed more than a dozen insurgent camps in the past week. Two newborns were among the first arrivals.
"Boko Haram killed the father of this child," Lami Musa told The Associated Press, cradling a four-day-old girl with black curls glistening with sweat in the 40-degrees C heat.
Tears came to her eyes when she was asked if she has other children, "Three of them. Boko Haram killed my husband and grabbed me. I have no idea where my other children are." She said she lost her family in an attack by the militants on her village of Lassa in December.
The baby was born the day before the group set off from the Sambisa for a refugee camp in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, crammed into the backs of rickety, open pick-up trucks.
On the trip's first day, one military vehicle escorting the group exploded a landmine, wounding two soldiers, according to a soldier traveling with them. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
Soldiers on foot then swept the road ahead of the convoy, he said, so it took three days to travel potholed roads for the 300 kilometers (200 miles) southwest to Yola.
Musa, 27, could barely walk when they arrived, limping on feet swollen to massive size. She said couldn't nurse her unnamed baby, because her breasts have no milk.
She's among several dozen in the group taken first to the clinic at the refugee camp, set up in an unused boarding school.
There, 22 were dispatched immediately to a hospital in town. Dr. Mohammed Auwal said many were suffering from malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition.
As night crept in, the camp is lit by a generator that powered the clinic and a bulb in a tree under which the military handed over the females to the National Emergency Management Agency at a brief ceremony.
For nearly a year, Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan had been promising to bring home all the people kidnapped by Boko Haram home especially 219 schoolgirls abducted from their boarding school in the town of Chibok.
