Beware of a girl, roaming in the street alone at eight o’clock in the morning!
People in Maiduguri and adjacent areas in north-eastern part of Nigeria feel like this. The area has been forcefully occupied by the Boko Haram militants. Here, local residents are habituated with terror attacks, as the main duty of the jihadist militant organisation is to carry out suicide attacks perfectly.
Suicide attack is the favourite game of various terror outfits in different parts of the world. And various extremist groups choose their pawns for the game accordingly. For example, Boko Haram deploys young girls for this purpose. Girls (read suicide bombers) – aged between five and 18 – arrive in the streets early in the morning. Usually, they wear suicide vests, packed with explosives and armed with a detonator, while on a mission. Their sole aim is to claim lives and create panic.

The 16-year-old Hadija said: “I didn’t want to kill anybody. I just didn’t know how to remove the vests and how to defuse the bomb.” Before welcoming the death, Hadija asked a 12-year-old girl: “What do you do with the bomb?” She replied: “What else…. kill myself by pressing the button…..”
Terrorists have to consider so many things while making preparations for suicide attacks. First, they have to kidnap girls, (then) propose them to marry and to take them to their leaders (if the girls refuse to marry them). The leader promises to take the girls to a beautiful place and the victims think that they will be allowed to reunite with their parents. However, they are asked to wear the vests and sacrifice their lives for a great cause. The number of suicide attacks by Boko Haram doubled in 2017 (compared to 2016). In a report, the UN stated that terror outfits used 110 minors to carry out suicidal attacks in 2017 and 76 of them were girls. When a girl blew herself up in Nigeria, she had a little child tied on her back.

Young girls are used as ‘human bombs’ in north-east Nigeria

Like Hadija, some girls managed to survive by surrendering themselves just before denoting the bomb. Others sought help from the common people, but failed to save themselves. Some suicide bombers went to the police station to surrender, but the police shot them to avoid blasts.
To use little children as suicide bombers is an old tactic. The Palestinian Hamas movement started using children as suicide bombers when the second Intifada began in Palestine in 2000. The Israeli forces claimed that 29 minors had successfully carried out terror attacks from 2000 to 2003, while 40 others were arrested. Later, Taliban and al-Qaeda militants set up a separate wing to nurture suicide bombers. Now, the ISIS and Boko Haram follow the same tradition.
The terrorists have adopted various strategies to ‘raise’ minor suicide bombers. In northern Afghanistan, they visit every village household to ‘collect’ young boys, few goats and money. The young boys find their places in terror camps and get ready for action. In terror camps, they are brainwashed, as terrorists tell them to kill evils and make the world a beautiful place. Basically, the terrorists try to control the innocent minds and their emotions so that they agree to sacrifice their lives for the sake of a better world. People can kill themselves and their loved ones, if they lose control over their emotions.

In his article Five Strategies of Terrorism, C C Harmon said that terror groups, too often called ‘mindless‘, are more often calculating. They usually set short-term and long-term aims to achieve their political objectives and use terrorism to advance those aims. According to Harmon, the five leading strategies adopted by terrorists are: (1) creation of societal dislocation or chaos; (2) discrediting or destroying a particular government; (3) rendering economic and property damage; (4) ‘bleeding’ state security forces and doing other military damage and (5) spreading fear for international effects. (Journal: Small Wars & Insurgencies; Volume 12, 2001 – Issue 3)
In May 2018, six members of a family carried out suicide attacks on three churches in Surabaya, Indonesia. The Indonesian police confirmed that the youngest member of the family was an eight-year-old girl. The head of the family was a leader of the local branch of Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an Indonesian ISIS-inspired network. While two teenaged sons rode motorcycles into Santa Maria Catholic Church and detonated explosives at 7:30am (local time), the father drove a bomb-laden car at Surabaya Centre Pentecostal Church at 7:35am and the mother, with her two daughters, carried out an attack on Diponegoro Indonesian Christian Church a few minutes later. The co-ordinated attacks killed 18 people, including the bombers, and injured more than 40.

Chibok school girls recently freed from Boko Haram captivity

The most important instrument to motivate adolescent minds is ‘ideology’. Ideology encourages minors to sacrifice their lives. Without ideology, terrorists can’t run the ‘business of terror’ and create panic throughout the globe. However, there is no ‘moral base’ of their ideology. The absence of morality allows terror outfits to use ideology for their own benefits. They believe that ‘religious ideology‘ is the best and most powerful, as it encourages parents to sacrifice their children. Little children – who want to live and enjoy their lives – are forced to follow the strict instruction: Sacrifice your life!

Israeli authorities released 12-year-old Dima Al-Wawi, the youngest Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails, after serving a sentence of four and a half months

Even after that, terrorists will try to justify their atrocities through ideology and the victims of terrorism will detonate bombs with a fearful mind. No one is there to tell them: “Where the mind is without fear/ and the head is held high/ where knowledge is free/ Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls/ Where words come out from the depth of truth/ where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection/ Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it’s way/ into the dreary desert sand of dead habit/ Where the mind is led forward by thee/ into ever widening thought and action/ In to that heaven of freedom, my father, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE!” (Song Offerings, Rabindranath Tagore, 1910)

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das