Where Girls Are Being Kidnapped and Used as Suicide Bombers

Joshua Meservey

Security, Africa

"That morning, in the midst of a crowd of displaced Nigerians, two of the girls blew themselves up, killing 58 people and wounding scores."

At dawn on February 10, a camp for displaced people in the northeast Nigerian town of Dikwa began stirring to life. Three unaccompanied young girls asking for shelter had arrived the day before, and spent the night with approximately 50,000 others who had fled the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram. That morning, in the midst of a crowd of displaced Nigerians, two of the girls blew themselves up, killing 58 people and wounding scores. The third girl with bombs strapped to her body decided not to detonate, and was taken into custody.

The three girls are part of an appalling trend begun after a multinational coalition last year started pushing Boko Haram out of the territory it controlled in northeast Nigeria. Since June 2014, Boko Haram has used approximately one hundred women and girls—some likely kidnapped—in terror attacks, in addition to its usual barbarisms.

Despite the violence, newly-elected President Muhammadu Buhari claimed in December 2015 that Nigeria has “technically won the war” against the group. As the attack on the Dikwa camp shows, however, his assessment was too optimistic.

Unless the Nigerian government and military undertake serious reforms and adopt a broader strategy that accounts for the various components of the Boko Haram phenomenon, the group will continue to be a threat, and likely even reconquer lost territory.

Buhari’s comments were most concerning because they suggest his administration may make the same mistakes as his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. During Jonathan’s tenure, Boko Haram seized chunks of lands in the northeast and routinely humiliated the Nigerian military in battle. It also carried out some of the globe’s worst terrorist atrocities—its infamous April 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls from a school in Chibok was only part of a campaign that made it the world’s deadliest terror organization that year.

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