UN deputy chief regrets girls’ grooming as suicide bombers

UN deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed has decried the use of young girls by Boko Haram terrorists as suicide bombers.Mohammed spoke in Bol, Chad, after talking to Halima Adam, one of the girls groomed for suicide mission, but now fighting back against the extremists in the Lake Chad basin.Halima said she was on Dec. 22, 2015, among three girls deployed to carry out suicide bomb attacks in the Lac Region town of Bol, 200 km north of N’Djamena but the mission was aborted.

“It was market day in Bol and I was with two other girls who like me carried explosives. I was just 15 years old. I was given drugs and had been trained by the extremist Boko Haram terrorist group to be a suicide bomber,” she said.The local authorities detected the three teenage girls and tried to arrest them, but the two other girls detonated their explosive vests, killing themselves and seriously wounding Halima, who survived but had both legs amputated below her knees.

The UN deputy chief, who is being accompanied on a UN-AU mission to the Sahel by other senior women from the world body and the African Union, on a high-level visit to South Sudan, Chad and Niger, regretted girls being used as suicide bombers.Mohammed said: “This is one of many stories I have heard, as this is where I come from. I come from Nigeria. This is sadly the story of many girls; but unlike Halima, many did not survive.”