Boko Haram used 83 child bombers against Nigeria – UNICEF

By MERCY BEN-KALIO

At least 83 child bombers have been used by the Boko Haram terrorists to attack Nigeria in 2017 alone, the UN had revealed.

The UN agency said out of the 83 children deployed by the atrocious insurgents, 55 were girls, mostly under 15 years old and 27 were boys. One was a baby strapped to a girl. Nineteen children were used last year.

The Boko Haram insurgency, now in its eighth year, has claimed over 20,000 lives and forced more than two million people to flee their homes over eight years.

The frequency of suicide bomb attacks in northeastern Nigeria has increased in the past few weeks, killing at least 170 people since June 1, according to a Reuters tally.

UNICEF, in a statement on Tuesday, said it was “extremely concerned about an appalling increase in the cruel and calculated use of children, especially girls, as ‘human bombs’ in northeast Nigeria. The use of children in this way is an atrocity”.

Boko Haram is trying to create an Islamic state in the Lake Chad region, which spans parts of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad. It gained notoriety by abducting more than 200 girls from the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok in April 2014. Aid groups say it has kidnapped thousands more adults and children.

Children who escape are often held by authorities or ostracized by their communities and families.

 Nigerian aid worker, Rebecca Dali, who runs an agency that offers counseling for those who were abducted, said children as young as four were among the 209 escapees her organization had helped since 2015.

 “They (former abductees) are highly traumatized,” Dali told Reuters on Monday at the United Nations in Geneva, where she received an award from the Sergio Vieira de Mello Foundation for her humanitarian work.

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Her team, which includes former police officers, identified some returnees as having been trained as suicide bombers. Dali said:

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 “There were two girls taught by Boko Haram to be suicide bombers. The girls confirmed that they were taught that their life was not worth living, that if they die detonating the bomb and killing a lot of people, then their lives will be profitable.

“Some 450,000 children are also at risk of life-threatening malnutrition in 2017 by the end of the year in northeast Nigeria, UNICEF said.

President Muhammadu Buhari said on Monday the country would “reinforce and reinvigorate” its fight against the group following the latest wave of attacks.

National daily reported earlier that the Boko Haram insurgents have killed three farmers and abducted one at the Moloi area of Maiduguri. The incident occurred on Tuesday August 15 when the insurgents attacked the farmers at a farm some few kilometres away from the village. It was also gathered that a witness, Ali Alhaji, said that the farmers went to work in their farms but did not return home in the evening.

Mr. Alhaji said that their families then alerted other people in the village on the missing farmers who dispatched a search team who recovered their corpses from the bushes