The number of children used by Boko Haram for suicide bombings in Nigeria has increased to 44 by the end of 2015, a report from UNICEF showed.
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In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Doune Porter, a spokesperson for UNICEF in Nigeria shared the stories of a girls who had been imprisoned by Boko Haram.
The towns and settlements were occupied by fleeing Boko Haram terrorists who escaped from villages previously cleared by troops of the Nigerian Army.
As it torments West Africa, Boko Haram is increasingly turning to children to carry out its crimes.
Roughly seven out of ten of these children are girls.
A destroyed village after it was attacked by Nigeria’s Boko Haram rebels on the shores of Lake Chad.
Some 20,000 children in the town and its surroundings have no school to attend, he said Thursday as parents started gathering at the school to pray for the safe return of their daughters.
It is two years since the group abducted some 270 Nigerian schoolgirls in Chibok, many of whom were said to have been forced to convert to Islam and marry their captors.
(Reuters/Afolabi Sotunde)Demonstrators hold up banners during a rally that was held to mark the 120th day since the abduction of two hundred school girls by the Boko Haram, in Abuja, August 12, 2014.
It said almost 1.3 million children have been displaced, about 1,800 schools are closed – either damaged, looted, burned down or used as shelter by displaced people and more than 5,000 children reported either as unaccompanied or separated from their parents.
The response to the crisis remains severely underfunded, however.
However, millions still require help, and UNICEF has received only $11 million of the $97 million required funding.
But UNICEF underscored that the repercussions were devastating for children caught up in the conflict.
Lai Mohammed, the country’s Minister of Information, said there were concerns that the girls did not appear to have changed sufficiently, that they are not as different as one might expect, given the two years that have elapsed since their disappearance.
And violence is not the only threat facing children in the region.
“The use of children, especially girls, as so-called suicide bombers has become a defining and alarming feature of this conflict”, Unicef regional spokesman Laurent Duvillier was quoted as telling the Thomas Reuters Foundation, a global organization working with journalists, NGOs, and law firms.
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The use of children to carry out suicide attacks has also led to youngsters being stigmatised in their home communities as potential security threats. The mother so feared her own daughter that she turned her in to the military.
