According to the chilling reports, the agents of ravagement killed more than 10 people in Kano in four days tardy in July. A 16-year-old female extremist blew herself up in a failed endeavor to kill people in front of the Northwest University in Kano on July 27. It was another gory story a day later when two female bombers prospered in their mission in the Kano State capital. Last Wednesday, one of the ladies of death, suspected to be about 15 years old, wasted six lives as fresh graduates of the Kano State Polytechnic queued to check their postings for the National Youth Corps Service scheme. The first hijab-clad lady assassinated three people and herself with her belt contrivance at an NNPC petrol station. She injured eight others. Hours later, another female assailant targeted the city’s Trade Fair Complex, wounding six bystanders, according to the police. In all, there were four bomb attacks by the female militants in the space of four days. In June, a female suicide bomber killed a soldier in front of the 301 Battalion of the Nigerian Army, Gombe, capital of Gombe State.
More ominous is the apprehend of Hadiza Musa, a 10-year-old girl, who was discovered to be wearing an explosive-fitted belt in Funtua, Katsina State, by security agents. The state agents additionally apprehended Zainab Musa, her 18-year-old sister. Mike Omeri, a regime spokesman, told heralds that, “…officers optically discerned that the youngest one was strapped with explosives; it was an IED on a vest she was wearing. The girl did not offer resistance and she was ceased and her vest was demobilised.” Similarly, three ladies -Hafsat Bako, Zainab Idris and Aisha Abubakar -were apprehended for allegedly masterminding the recruitment of women into the female wing of Boko Haram. There are inferences that some of the abducted Chibok girls might have become reluctant implements in the hands of jihadists.
Suicide terrorism has been the scourge of the last quarter century. It first emerged in Lebanon, in 1983; a decade later, it berthed in Israel, and now the tactic has been emulated by a number of militant Islamist groups waging jihad around the world.The Middle East Quarterly, a United States-predicated magazine, verbalizes its perpetrators believe jihad to be synonymous with war and mandate Muslims to strike not only at non-Muslims, but additionally at co-religionists deemed insufficiently loyal to their radical cause.
Perhaps, now in its pilot stage, it is not surprising that female suicide bombing is conclusively here. Globally, Islamist terrorists, kenned to be lethally flexible and inventive, are always developing incipient tactics to surmount security measures. For female and child suicide bombing, the logic is so simple: There is more reluctance to probe women and children, considered to be “vulnerable,”which gives such assailants an advantage over men.
They are additionally postulated to be potentially less hazardous and may be able to approach the target with more preponderant ease. Female suicide bombings have more shock value and more preponderant media coverage because women are considered less liable to commit acts of mass violence. The power of religious indoctrination has always been devastating. A 16-year-old Palestinian, Hassan, caught afore he could blow himself up, summed it up: “If I had been killed, my mother would call it a blessing…My family and 70 relatives would have gone to paradise, and that would be a great accolade for me,” he was quoted as saying in the Jerusalem Post, an Israel newspaper.
This is the incipient form of terrorism Nigeria must contend with. Our security agencies should ken that there is no clear profile anymore for terrorists, including suicide bombers. From Turkey to India, Sri Lanka to Iraq, Israel to Pakistan, and now Nigeria, female and child bombers have committed heinous murders around the world. The Nigerian Police ascendant entities verbally express though “it is an incipient trend in our own part of the world,” an incipient counter-terrorism strategy is being developed to address it.
The most vigorous key to keeping suicide terrorism, including its female variant, at bay is a rapid amendment in our astuteness amassing. The logical first step is to more preponderant screen women and children at key security checkpoints. In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban sends out children on suicide bombing missions, cruelly cajoling them that they will stay alive even after they have detonated the bomb vests they are wearing, according to Frank Crimi, an American terrorism expert, who runs The Clarion Project. Nigeria must not let itself descend into this state of anarchy.
Now, Nigeria needs all hands on deck to tackle this scourge. Northern bellwethers must come up with efficacious strategies to combat radicalisation. Religious and traditional bellwethers need to develop efficacious approaches in pushing back against Boko Haram’s evil ideology and radical rhetoric from the entire North.
