By Philip Obaji Jr.
WARRI, Nigeria— What we
call Boko Haram is a fractured, brutal, and deeply cynical collection of
killers supposedly waging a religious war against the government of Nigeria.
But as the government’s military offensive continues to deprive them of
territory, these would-be holy warriors have resorted to the use of women and
children, even infants, as part of their suicide-bombing avant-garde. And at
the same time they have targeted public health programmes, trying to stop
campaigns to vaccinate children, and thus putting many tens of thousands at
risk.
All this is done in the
name of what they call Islam. But this has become a war on innocents.
The town of Madagali,
located just at the edge of Sambissa forest in Nigeria’s northeastern Adamawa
state, is a place where Boko Haram often uses young girls as walking bombs.
Since Nigerian forces regained control of the town in 2015, over 100 people
have been killed by female bombers in four separate attacks in Madagali. But
after last month’s deadly bombing in which 56 civilians were killed, security
was beefed up. Now anyone entering the town is searched first by local
vigilantes—and then by the military.
This new screening
system—though of much greater risk to security personnel—has proved effective.
A couple of intended suicide attacks have been foiled this month by members of
the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a group of locals helping the military
fight Boko Haram, and also by Nigerian soldiers.
On Jan. 4, three female
suicide bombers were shot dead in Bakin Dutse, a village in Gulak town close to
Madagali. Officials said the three girls had planned to attack a market in
Gulak before they were intercepted.
“On seeing them [the
suicide bombers] fast approaching, they [the CJTF] asked them to stop, but the
girls declined, instead running faster, so one was instantly gunned down and
the bomb on her body exploded. So also the second girl,” said Yusuf Gulak, a
local official, in an interview with ICIR Nigeria. “The third girl attempted to
run but could not succeed as she was also shot dead.”
A week before this
incident, the CJTF foiled an attempt by two female suicide bombers to attack a
cattle market in the restive city of Maiduguri in neighboring Borno state. The
vigilantes suspected they were carrying bombs when the girls rushed passed
security and began to roam around the market. One of them accidentally blew
herself up as the CJTF came after her, and the other was arrested by the
vigilante group.
After these failures, Boko
Haram adopted a new form of attack—bombing with babies.
Two weeks ago, three
female suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing at least 11 people and
injuring 14 others as they approached a CJTF checkpoint entering Madagali.
One of the suicide bombers
had a baby on her back, an apparent move to fool security officials into
believing that she was a nursing mother and, as such, shouldn’t be suspected of
being a terrorist.
Witnesses said she was
wearing a long hijab, or veil, which covered the baby, and in-between her and
the child was a bomb which the infant was resting against.
“She was the first to
approach the vigilantes, who didn’t suspect her because she was carrying a
baby,” a member of the CJTF who had been briefed on the incident by colleagues
who were present, told The Daily Beast. “After she slipped through, she stood
at a corner waiting for the other girls.”
But the others appeared to
be too scared of passing through security as they kept roaming round the
checkpoint, reluctant to advance. When men from the CJTF approached them, they
detonated their devices, killing a couple of the vigilantes in the process. The
first suicide bomber then blew up herself and the baby.
“She must have thought
that she would be shot by the soldiers nearby if she didn’t act fast,” the CJTF
member said. “It appeared their main target was actually the market close to
the checkpoint.”
The use of innocent
infants as forced accomplices in suicide bombings has been tested by the
jihadists in the past, but without so much success.
On Nov. 28, precisely, a
woman suicide bomber carrying a baby on her back was shot by soldiers at a
checkpoint in Maiduguri. Her explosives detonated as a result of the shot,
killing the woman and the baby. Since then, no suicide attack involving a baby has
been reported.
Earlier, when the
jihadists began to deploy female suicide bombers, the girls had bombs tied
firmly to their backs in the same manner used by many women to carry their
children in northern Nigeria.
“Now that the CJTF is
aware of this trick, it is going to be more vigilant,” said Yusuf Mohammed, an
advisor to the vigilante group, based in Maiduguri. “No one is going overlook
any lady because she is pregnant, or because she is carrying a baby.”
The use of innocents to
kill innocents took another turn last week when a 7-year-old boy blew himself
up during dawn prayers inside a Maiduguri mosque.
Among those killed was
Aliyu Mani, the director of veterinary medicene at the University of Maiduguri.
The highly respected 59-year-old professor died on the spot.
His young, schoolboy
killer had been sent on his mission of death by the Boko Haram faction that’s
headed by Abubakar Shekau, a man even the so-called Islamic State won’t accept
as legitimate.
Authorities said a second
suicide bomber—a teenage girl—was seen in a separate wing of the school
speaking to herself. When officials asked her to identify herself, she
detonated her bomb and died.
Shekau, in a released
audio message, claimed the group carried out the attack because the university
was mixing “Islam with democracy.”
“We carried out the attack
in the morning and I am speaking to you this evening,” he said in the local
Hausa language. “Here in Maiduguri… you will see more of these attacks.”
Shekau did not make a
specific link, but the bombing at the university came just days after the World
Health Organization (WHO) announced a mass vaccination campaign to protect more
than 4 million children—aged 6 to 10—in northeastern Nigeria against the
potentially deadly measles virus.
Immediately, some locals
in Maiduguri began spreading rumors that the vaccines are stored in the
university’s medical department, thus making it a likely Boko Haram target. And
professor Mani, the victim with the biggest profile, has been a leading voice
in the call for regular vaccinations for students and practitioners in the
field.
“He stands for everybody
without segregation,” said Philemon Columbus, a veterinary medicine lecturer at
the University of Abuja in Nigeria’s capital city, who studied under Mani. “He
does not look at religion. He does not look at ethnicity. He’s so transparent.”
Boko Haram has never
hidden its hatred for vaccinations and those who carry them out, and it can
draw on deep currents of suspicion.
Vaccinations—especially
polio vaccinations—are widely viewed not just by Boko Haram, but by a number of
Muslim clerics in northern Nigeria, as a conspiracy to sterilize young girls
and eliminate the country’s Muslim population.
In 2003, a Kano physician heading
the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria said the medicine had been “corrupted
and tainted by evildoers from America and their Western allies.” Not long after
that, the Kano state government suspended polio immunization for 13 months as
suspicion surrounding the program grew. As a result, the number of infections
increased massively and the virus spread to 17 countries that had been
polio-free.
Deadly attacks on health
workers involved with vaccination campaigns in Nigeria started in 2012 not long
after the trend began in Pakistan, where militants accused them of spying for
the U.S. following reports that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake vaccination
program to help the CIA track down and kill Osama bin Laden.
In October of that year,
two police officers involved in guarding an immunization campaign were shot and
killed in Kano by suspected Boko Haram militants.
The jihadists are also
believed to have killed nine female polio vaccinators in two shootings at
health centers in northwestern Nigeria nearly five years ago. In the first
attack in February 2013 in Kano, the biggest city in Nigeria’s predominantly
Muslim north, the polio vaccinators were shot dead by gunmen who drove up on a
motor tricycle. Half an hour later gunmen targeted a clinic in the Unguwa Uku
neighbourhood—just outside Kano—as the vaccinators prepared to start work. Four
people were killed in the incident.
Why take such risks to
immunize children against measles, a disease many in the West see as a minor
problem?
In fact the disease
claimed more than 134,000 lives globally in 2015, and in Nigeria’s Borno state,
for example, more than 77 percent of children younger than 5 have never
received the vaccine.
“Massive disruption to
health services in conflict-affected areas for many years has deprived these
children of essential childhood vaccinations,” said Wondimagegnehu Alemu, WHO
Representative in Nigeria, in a statement by the organization. “In addition,
many of them have severe malnutrition, making them extremely vulnerable to
serious complications and death from measles.”
But Boko Haram will see
this move as un-Islamic—a Western plot against it—and to fight back against
this effort to save children, it may well use its new weapons of choice: the
children themselves.
Photograph: Jim
Tanner/Reuters
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