KANO, Nigeria — Last month 13-year-old Zaharau Babangida refused to set off explosives she was carrying after being sent by her father to camps run by the Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
Babangida was arrested by police Dec. 10 after two other female bombers killed at least six people at a textile market in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city.
She agreed to travel from Bauchi to Kano after the militants “pointed at a ditch and told me that I am going to be killed there” if she refused.
“The members asked me if I wanted to commit a suicide bombing and that if I did I will enter paradise,” said Babangida, who was wearing the flowing religious garment known as the hijab, which covers the body from head to feet, as she was paraded in front of reporters Dec. 24.
Young girls are being increasingly coerced into suicide attacks in the predominately Muslim north as Boko Haram evolves tactics in its six-year campaign to bring Islamist rule to Africa’s largest economy. In the past week, a girl as young as 10 set off explosives at a market in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, killing at least 20.
Two others detonated bombs near a mobile-phone market in the town of Potiskum, killing at least seven and injuring 48 people, Yobe state Gov. Ibrahim Gaidam said in an e-mail.
Women wearing the hijab already were facing heightened security scrutiny across northern Nigeria after a spate of Boko Haram suicide bombings attributed to similarly clad attackers.
“It is very shocking for someone to take a child that they bore as her biological father and recruit her to commit suicide,” said Muhammad Faruk, a 33-year-old bus driver and resident of Potiskum. “Where do they get them?”
Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates to “Western education is a sin,” has increased kidnappings since it seized more than 200 schoolgirls from the northeastern town of Chibok in April, drawing international condemnation.
An additional 191 people were abducted last month in the remote village of Gumsuri, the group’s largest mass kidnapping since Chibok.
Many of the girls probably have been brainwashed by the militants into committing the attacks, Bawa Abdullahi Wase, a security analyst and associate at the Network for Justice, said by phone from the capital, Abuja.
“The reported youthfulness of several of the purported suicide bombers suggests that they were selected from Boko Haram’s pool of kidnap victims and coerced into carrying out the above-mentioned attacks,” Britain-based security consultancy Drum Cussac said in an e-mail.
The bombings in Maiduguri and Potiskum “underscored the militants’ sustained intent and capacity to cause a maximum of civilian casualties in terrorist attacks,” it said.
