At just 14 years old, Halima Audu was held captive in a Boko Haram camp where she witnessed unimaginable horrors. Girls, some as young as nine, were sent on suicide bombing missions targeting crowded markets and public places.
“They put explosives on her and she went with it. On that day, there were three of them — all young girls,” Audu recalled. Scheduled to wear a suicide vest herself as “bride number three,” she managed to escape.
Child Soldiers in Northeast Nigeria
Boko Haram and the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) have made the recruitment and training of children a core part of their operations in Nigeria’s northeast.
Both groups are known for mass abductions of children, especially girls, as part of their violent campaign to impose strict Islamic rule.
Between June 2014, when Boko Haram deployed its first female suicide bomber, and February 2018, the group carried out 240 suicide attacks by females, according to the US-based Combating Terrorism Center. These attacks killed about 1,200 people and injured 3,000 others.
In that same period, over 465 women and girls were deployed or arrested in connection with such bombings.
A recent UNICEF report confirms the scale of the crisis, stating that more than 8,000 boys and girls have been recruited and used as child soldiers since the insurgency began in 2009. Audu said she saw boys undergoing military training during her captivity.
Training Children to Kill
The groups are not only using boys as fighters but are also conditioning them to be merciless killers. Both Boko Haram and ISWAP have released propaganda videos showing child soldiers carrying out executions.
In January, ISWAP released footage of children executing three captives, at least two believed to be Nigerian soldiers. Another Boko Haram video shows a boy, about eight years old, executing university student Dalep Daciya, who had been abducted while traveling to school.
Dalep’s father, David, told Africa Calling podcast that watching the video was devastating, especially since the family never recovered his body.
Force and Brainwashing
According to Audu, the jihadists use both violence and indoctrination to compel children into committing atrocities. “Boko Haram said if you detonate a suicide bomb, you will go to paradise,” she explained, adding that refusal often meant death.
Security experts warn that these children, if not rescued and rehabilitated, will pose a serious long-term threat to Nigeria. Felix Olorunda of SSV Protection Services stressed the urgency of intervention: “They are going to be terrorists, that is what they are training them to be. The only option is to urgently rescue the children and give them re-education.”
