KM ANIK
24 UPDATE
Collected By New York Times
BANGLADESH
The girls didn’t want to kill anyone. They walked in silence for a while, the weight of the explosives around their waists pulling down on them as they fingered the detonators and tried to think of a way out.
“I don’t know how to get this thing off me,” Hadiza, 16, recalled saying as she headed out on her mission.
“What are you going to do with yours?” she asked the 12-year-old girl next to her, who was also wearing a bomb.
“I’m going to go off by myself and blow myself up,” the girl responded hopelessly.
It was all happening so fast. After being kidnapped by Boko Haram this year, Hadiza was confronted by a fighter in the camp where she was being held hostage. He wanted to “marry” her. She rejected him.
“You’ll regret this,” the fighter told her.
A few days later, she was brought before a Boko Haram leader. He told her she would be going to the happiest place she could imagine. Hadiza thought she was going home. He was talking about heaven.
They came for her at night, she said, grabbing a suicide belt and attaching it to her waist. The fighters then sent her and the 12-year-old girl out on foot, alone, telling them to detonate the bombs at a camp for Nigerian civilians who have fled the violence Boko Haram has inflicted on the region.
“I knew I would die and kill other people, too,” Hadiza recalled. “I didn’t want that.”
Northeastern Nigeria, now in its eighth year of war with Boko Haram, has become a place afraid of its own girls.
So far this year, militants have carried out more than twice as many suicide bombings than they did in all of 2016, and the attacks keep coming.
According to Unicef, more than 110 children have been used as suicide bombers since the start of the year – at least 76 of them girls. Most were under 15 years old. One girl blew herself up along with a baby strapped to her back.
Bombers here at the center of the battle against Boko Haram have struck mosques, marketplaces, checkpoints, camps for displaced civilians and anywhere else people gather, including a single polo field attacked multiple times. Trenches have been dug around the University of Maiduguri, a frequent bombing target, in hopes of slowing down attackers.
“I knew very well that bomb would kill me.”MAIMUMA, 14
The deployment of children has become so frighteningly common that officials in the areas where Boko Haram operates are warning citizens to be on the lookout for girl bombers. A huge billboard here in Maiduguri – the Nigerian city where Boko Haram was born – proclaims “Stop Terrorism” with the image of a scowling, wild-eyed girl with explosives on her chest, clutching a detonator.
Officials are publicly urging parents not to hand over their children to Boko Haram for use as bombers, while the military is circulating a video telling bombers they can surrender. It features an 11-year-old girl.
“Do not allow them to tie explosives on you,” says the girl in the video. “It is dangerous.”
The public service ad paints bombers and their families as Boko Haram collaborators who either support the militants’ campaign of terror, or were brainwashed or drugged into doing so.
But The New York Times tracked down and interviewed 18 girls in Nigeria who were sent on suicide missions by Boko Haram. Their accounts shatter the narrative often perpetuated by officials.
Far from having been willing participants, the girls described being kidnapped and held hostage, with family members killed during their capture.
All of the girls recounted how armed militants forcibly tied suicide belts to their waists, or thrust bombs into their hands, before pushing them toward crowds of people. Most were told that their religion compelled them to carry out the orders. And all of them resisted, preventing the attacks by begging ordinary citizens or the authorities to help them.
Aisha, 15, fled her home with her father and 10-year-old brother, but Boko Haram caught them. The fighters killed her father and, soon after, she watched them strap a bomb to her brother, squeeze him between two militants on a motorbike and speed away.
The two militants returned without him, cheering. Her little brother had blown up soldiers at a barracks, she learned. The militants told her not to cry for him. “He killed wicked people,” they told her.
Later, they tied a bomb on her, too, instructing her to head toward the same barracks.
Like some of the other girls, Aisha said she had considered walking off to an isolated spot and pressing the detonator, far from other people, to avoid hurting anyone else. Instead, she approached the soldiers and persuaded them to remove the explosives from her body, delicately.
“I told them, ‘My brother was here and killed some of your men,’” she said. “My brother wasn’t sensible enough to know he didn’t have to do it. He was only a small child.”
Other girls, whose full names are also being withheld out of concern for their security, had similar stories of terror and defiance.
Fall on your tummy, face down, the militants told Fatima A., 17. But when she approached soldiers, she put up her hands and yelled at the top of her voice: “Look! I’m innocent! I’m not part of them! They forced me!
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