Battered by unrelenting military onslaught, Boko Haram/ISWAP intensifies recruitment of child-soldiers

Boko Haram child-soldier

By: Zagazola Makama

The Islamist State of the West African Province (ISWAP), the terrorist group operating in the Lake Chad Basin, are currently resorting to the recruitment of young children as fighters following the devastating setbacks occasioned by the unrelenting bombardment from both land and air by the Nigerian Military.

The recruitment and use of child soldiers by the Boko Haram faction Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS) was widely known. However, it’s rival faction, has been doing the same across the shores of the Lake Chad following the recent mass elimination of ISWAP top leaders and fighters in some of their hideouts by the Nigerian Military.

Sources conversant with activities of the terrorist groups identified the clash between ISWAP and JAS Boko Haram, which triggered the surrendering of over 50, 000 members of the sect, as the major reason for the desperate drive to forcibly recruit hapless children into their fighting force.

Another potent issue that necessitates the recourse to child-soldiers by the leadership of the terrorist groups include mass desertion of fighters owing to continuous military offensives which have denied them respite nor any kind of sanctuary over several months. Having to live under constant fear of troops’ bombardment and enduring severe hunger and disease were enough reasons for quite a number of the fighters to abandon ship and run away. In effect, the only way for the group to remain afloat was to make use of the kids they abducted around their enclaves to fight their obnoxious cause.

As a matter of fact, the history of the conscription of child-soldiers by the Boko Haram terrorist group began in 2016 when little children as young as 3 year-olds were being recruited using the influence of pseudo-clerics who disguised under the pretext of teaching them Arabic education to ferry them into the dark world of terrorism. The hapless kids would will later undergo combat and non-combat training in the group’s radicalisation camps known as “Darul Quran”.

At first, the kids were only sent on suicide missions but when faced with imminent depletion as a result of troops’ intensive offensives that clinically eliminated hundreds of fighters, they began to draft the children into the battle field as combatant fighters.

According to intelligence reports, the ISWAP terrorists through the “Darul Ilm and Darul Qur’an” Institutions have trained hundreds of child soldiers through its subsidiary known “Albahrul Islam, an ISIS supported institute in Somalia. Reports say, so far, they have graduated more than 2,000 kid-militants from across the African continent who underwent combat, non-combat operations, bomb making, martial arts as well as other weapon handling technical trainings for about six months.

In January 2022, the institute established training camps in KURNAWA, Arge, Metele and Tumbum Allura with its head office at KAYOWA in Abadam local government area.

In February 2022, more than 200 of the newly graduated child-soldiers from Lake Chad were deployed as mercenaries to Mali and Niger to form alliance with the Islamic State of the Greater Sahel to wage campaign of terror under the supervision of the ISIS Central Command.
Major General Christopher Musa Musa, the Theatre Commander Operation Hadin Kai, said that the conscription of children by Boko Haram/ ISWAP was one of the driving force of atrocities.

Musa said that the recruitment of under aged children was a war crime under international humanitarian law. According to him, the recruitment of children is also destroying the society and robbing them of their future, noting that women were used as sex slaves while the children were forced to commit atrocities against their wish.

“When we arrest them, sometimes they spent three days without knowing what they are doing because they are under the influence of hard drugs. This was why they are not afraid to die. So even if you shoot a Boko Haram of ISWAP he doesn’t feel the pain immediately”, he said.

Since 2009, Boko Haram has killed 350,000 mostly women and children in northeast Nigeria and displaced over three million people from Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states.