Nigeria Witnessed Four-Times Child Bombers In 2017 Than In 2016- UNICEF

The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) has raised the alarm that Boko Haram militants in Nigeria’s northeast deployed four times as many child suicide bombers this year as they used in all of 2016.

In a report on Tuesday, the Fund said eighty-three children have been used as bombers since Jan. 1, 2017.

Of those, 55 were girls, mostly under 15 years old and 27 were boys. One was a baby strapped to a girl.

UNICEF noted that in 2016, nineteen children were used.

It expressed the worry that 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.”

Reuters reported that 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.

“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,” Dali said.

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.