Residents of Borno State, North East Nigeria, have been on June 29, 2024 reminded that regardless of efforts by the safety businesses, the darkish days of suicide bombing are nonetheless with them. This reminder got here within the guise of three feminine suicide bombers who detonated Improvised Explosive Gadgets (IEDs) in strategic places, killing 32 individuals, whereas 52 others have been injured. They focused a marriage, a funeral and a hospital in coordinated assaults, disguising them as wedding ceremony and funeral friends to realize entry to the venues.
Extra stunning is the report that one in all them had a toddler strapped on her again who was killed after the bomb went off. Shortly after the feminine bombers carried out their dastardly act on harmless wedding ceremony friends in Gwoza city, others detonated a number of IEDs at different places in Pulka and Marrabban Gwoza, leaving their regular traces of tears, sorrow and blood.
Whereas the latest assaults have attracted world outrage and outright condemnation, President Bola Tinubu, in his response, described the incident as “a determined act of terror and clear manifestation of the stress mounted in opposition to terrorists and the success achieved in degrading their capability to launch offensives”.
Two days earlier than the assault in Borno, the Director of Defence Media Operations of the Nigerian Military, Main Normal Edward Buba, whereas addressing journalists, stated safety forces had enormously degraded the terrorists.
Nonetheless, the resurgence of suicide bombings in Borno has raised important issues concerning the safety state of affairs within the area, questioning claims by the federal government and army that the Boko Haram insurgency and different acts of terrorism have been degraded. A couple of decade in the past, suicide bombing was a thorn in authorities’s flesh when the Boko Haram menace reared its ugly head within the North East till army operations decapacitated the insurgents.
Whereas suicide bombing within the North East, coupled with banditry, kidnapping, farmers/herders’ clashes and different types of criminality in different components of the nation, worrisome, extra disturbing is how women and younger ladies, thought-about because the weaker intercourse, have been coerced into this unwholesome act, making it very harmful.
Final month, safety operatives in Katsina State reportedly apprehended a girl, recognized as Aisha Abubakar, for transporting ammunition to terrorists. She was stated to have initially denied involvement however later confessed to transporting the ammunition to the terrorist group from Nassarawa State.
In response to 2017 analysis by The Combating Terrorism Centre, an educational establishment at the USA Navy Academy in West Level, Boko Haram terrorists have used greater than 200 feminine suicide bombers between 2014 and 2017 to hold out assaults. In 2019, the sect carried out 11 suicide bombing assaults, leading to 68 deaths. 4 of the bombings have been carried out by females, and males carried out seven.
Additionally, on June 17, 2019, three suicide bombers, two women and a boy, killed 30 individuals and injured 39 others in Borno State. On January 30, 2020, two suicide bombers detonated explosives within the Muna Galti space of Maiduguri (Borno state), killing 5 individuals and wounding a number of others.
Between 2012 and 2019, Boko Haram recruited and used women to hold out assaults, raped and compelled them to marry members in opposition to their needs, amongst different grave violations. The usage of ladies and women to commit these heinous acts reached a crescendo inside these years, whereas from 2020 to 2023, the North East area recorded a major discount in assaults till they struck once more final week!
It’s relatively unlucky that regardless of all measures being put in place to safe the lives of residents, the audacity to unleash terror on harmless residents has continued unabated. The latest assault on Gwoza was stated to have been carried out regardless of army operatives’ presence within the space.
This newspaper is fearful that regardless of the federal government’s efforts, the actions of insurgents have refused to be successfully checked. Why ladies and women are strategically used as suicide bombers stays a supply of concern, because it has continued to create suspicion among the many public.
There are various theories as to why these retailers of demise strategically use ladies and younger women. One is the truth that ladies are much less prone to be suspected, and as such, the onslaught of Boko Haram is additional sustained utilizing this technique.
Once more, a few of these ladies are both hypnotised or made to imagine that they haven’t any alternative, particularly with a promise of ‘paradise’. The latest resurgence of feminine suicide bombings within the Northeast ought to be a supply of great concern to everybody following its destabilising impact within the northern area.
We can not deny the truth that terrorism, which has metamorphosed into all types of vices equivalent to banditry and kidnapping, has led to meals inflation within the nation, as farmers can now not go to their farms for concern of shedding their lives. This newspaper is of the view that the federal government and its businesses want to return to the drafting board, interact stakeholders from the area to counter this rising risk and stop extra younger women and girls from being recruited or compelled into committing such brutality.
