Eighty percent of the suicide bombers used by the terrorist group Boko Haram are girls, according to a recent UNICEF report. Since 2014, the report claims, 117 children have been used in attacks and suicide bombings. In the first three months of 2017, 27 cases of children involved in suicide attacks were reported, “a figure roughly equivalent to the number recorded for the whole of 2016,” said Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF’s director for Central and Western Africa.
The report states the first four attacks carried out by children date back to 2014, but in 2015 the number rose to 56. During 2016, 30 of these attacks were registered and, in just the first three months of 2017, the number is already around 27. As a result, children are now looked at with growing concern at markets and public squares, according to L’Osservatore Romano.
Although UNICEF calls on all parties involved in the conflict to commit to the safety and well-being of children (asking to put an end to Boko Haram’s actions, and to provide soldier children held in military facilities with all the support they need to facilitate their re-integration to civil life), the violence in Nigeria does not stop: Nigerian authorities recently arrested five members of the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram who were planning to attack the embassies of Great Britain and the United States in Abuja, the spokesperson of the Department of State Services declared, adding the men were linked to militias of the so-called Islamic state (ISIS) in central Nigeria.
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