Boko Haram’s abducted girls to blow them up, Experts say.
Boko Haram’s use of girl suicide bombers intensifies amid terror campaign.
Experts say Nigeria’s Boko Haram appears to be increasing its use of a particularly brutal terrorist tactic: forcing abducted girls to blow themselves up in crowded spaces.
Three young female suicide bombers, one thought to be about 10, carried out deadly attacks in crowded marketplaces last weekend.
Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sin,” ignited international outrage when it kidnapped 273 girls from the Chibok Government Secondary School on April 15, 2014.
“Boko Haram doesn’t see age as a boundary. Age doesn’t carry the same value for Boko Haram. They see children as they would see any other target and regard children as expendable resources in this way,” Elizabeth Donnelly, assistant head of the Africa Program for Chatham House, said in an interview with Yahoo News.
Donnelly said we have known that the group has been abducting young boys and girls and potentially using them for several years. But we have not always had a lot of evidence on how they have been used.
“It’s likely they were deployed as weapons and shields in battles,” she said.
Boko Haram has imprisoned hundreds of children in camps with cultlike practices, but we have little knowledge of the trauma they experience, Donnelly explained.
We also do not know whether the girls know that the terrorists have attached explosive devices to their bodies before sending them into busy areas.
“They would have little to no choice either way,” Donnelly pointed out. “They are likely young, terrified people.”
Adotei Akwei, managing director of government relations for Amnesty International, said the Nigerian government’s inability to protect the lives of people in the country’s northern areas is alarming.
“The Boko Haram insurgency has consistently, since 2005, targeted women and girls and abducted them,” he told Yahoo News. “It’s not a far stretch to imagine them using these girls as child soldiers.”
On Wednesday, Amnesty International released before-and-after satellite images depict the magnitude of the attacks on the towns of Baga and Doron Baga.
Taken on Jan. 2 and Jan. 7, the images show the loss of 3,700 homes and stores that were severely damaged or completely destroyed over the Jan. 3 weekend, which represents a major escalation in the insurgency.
