Survival stories of teenage girls shatter collaborator narrative
They foiled militants’ plans to turn them into suicide bombers
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — The girls didn’t want to kill anyone. They walked in silence for a while, the weight of the explosives around their waists pulling down on them as they fingered the detonators and tried to think of a way out.
“I don’t know how to get this thing off me,” Hadiza, 16, recalled saying as she headed out on her mission.
“What are you going to do with yours?” she asked the 12-year-old girl next to her, who was also wearing a bomb.
“I’m going to go off by myself and blow myself up,” the girl responded hopelessly.
It was all happening so fast. After being kidnapped by Boko Haram this year, Hadiza was confronted by a fighter in the camp where she was being held hostage. He wanted to “marry” her. She rejected him.
“You’ll regret this,” the fighter told her.
A few days later, she was brought before a Boko Haram leader. He told her she would be going to the happiest place she could imagine. Hadiza thought she was going home. He was talking about heaven.
They came for her at night, she said, grabbing a suicide belt and attaching it to her waist. The fighters then sent her and the 12-year-old girl out on foot, alone, telling them to detonate the bombs at a camp for Nigerian civilians who have fled the violence Boko Haram has inflicted on the region.
“I knew I would die and kill other people, too,” Hadiza recalled. “I didn’t want that.”
Northeastern Nigeria, now in its eighth year of war with Boko Haram, has become a place afraid of its own girls.
So far this year, militants have carried out more than twice as many suicide bombings than they did in all of 2016, and the attacks keep coming.
According to UNICEF, more than 110 children have been used as suicide bombers since the start of the year — at least 76 of them girls. Most were under 15 years old. One girl blew herself up along with a baby strapped to her back.