A bombed out van. BBC.
Boko Haram has greatly increased the number of suicide bombings using women and children in Nigeria. BBC. Last year Boko Haram committed 26 suicide bombings. This year they have already committed 27. 75% of these bombings are conducted by females, many of them children as young as 7. As Boko Haram is pushed out of territory and suffers military setbacks, they have become more reliant on this kind of terrorism. It may be improper to call these attacks suicide bombings because many of the women may have been coerced into doing them. Some of the bombers may not even have known what they were doing. There is some suspicion that the women and girls were tricked into picking up what they thought were parcels. The fight against Boko Haram has killed around 15,000 people and the group has a long history of treating women poorly.
My Comment:
Well, that is about the most evil thing I have heard in a long time. Strapping a bomb to your chest and killing a bunch of civilians? Evil. Making someone else do it for you? Evil and cowardly. Tricking a child to do it for you? That's the kind of evil that is hard to comprehend. I've heard some truly horrifying things in my life but this is serial killer kind of evil.
Using children in warfare is nothing new. And neither is killing children. But something about this combination is just beyond what I am prepared to comprehend. What kind of person looks at a 7 year old child and thinks "this is the perfect delivery system for my bomb"? Even if that child is a different race, religion or gender, it's still a kid right? And I can't imagine that even extreme forms of Islam consider killing children a good thing right? As far as I know, even ISIS doesn't go that far, though it is important to note that Boko Haram has pledged intelligence to them.
You have to think that this is counter productive. Nigeria isn't that great of a place, and I know the government there is guilty of its own atrocities, but as far as I know they don't use children as suicide bombers. If your choice is between two groups that are both pretty bad, I think most people would like to support the one that isn't killing children.
As for Boko Haram, I hope they lose and lose hard. Though I'm generally against war crimes I think it would be perfectly understandable if the Nigerians stopped taking them as prisoners. Unfortunatly, the fact that Boko Haram uses a lot of child soldiers means that many of their troops never had a chance to choose a normal life. They didn't choose evil, evil chose them...
Unfortunately nobody seems to care about Boko Haram because Boko Haram is in Africa. Nobody cares about Africa, or at least any African nation that isn't on the Mediterranean coast. I've noticed on my blog that the posts about Boko Haram consistently have fewer views then pretty much any other topic I cover. People read "Boko Haram" and "Africa" and their eyes just glaze over and they read something else. After all, Africans killing Africans is nothing new...
You wouldn't think that would be true. After all Boko Haram touches on a lot of high impact issues that are dominating the news lately. Obviously, radical Islam is the number one international news story, but you would think that the way they treat women would be huge news. Boko Haram is pretty much the straw man argument that social justice warriors make about "the patriarchy" incarnate. They hate women, they want them to have zero rights and have no problems killing them. But the political left ignores them, especially after the failure of the #bringbackourgirls hashtag.
The only good news out of all of this is that these attacks are pretty obviously a sign of desperation. Boko Haram has suffered several defeats recently. They have lost some of the towns they had conquered and several of the people they kidnapped were rescued. It seems like they are being pushed back and pushed back hard. Hopefully they will be defeated utterly and the survivors will pay for what they have done...
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