The 10,000 Kidnapped Boys of Boko Haram By Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kidnapped-boys-of-boko-haram-1471013062
The militant group has forced thousands to become child jihadists. As many escape, Nigeria wonders what to do with them.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—In a forest of thorn trees somewhere far outside this city, the Boko Haram insurgency ran a boot camp for about 100 boys. Children as young as 5 years old learned to handle assault rifles and march through the woods in flip-flops. Their teacher was only 15.
“I was terrified if I didn’t do it, they would kill me,” said Idriss, the teenage instructor, in an interview. He said he was kidnapped by the militants in 2014 but has since escaped.
While the world focused on Boko Haram’s mass kidnappings of women and girls, the Islamist group was stealing an even greater number of boys. Over the past three years, Boko Haram has kidnapped more than 10,000 boys and trained them in boot camps in abandoned villages and forest hide-outs, according to government officials in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, and to Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.
Abubakar was abducted by Boko Haram and forced to participate in the violent terrorist group’s campaign in northeast Nigeria. He managed to escape a year later. Video: Gabe Johnson/Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/WSJ
Child soldiering was a big problem in various collapsing states in the 1990s, including some in Africa. What is happening here in northeastern Nigeria is part of a disturbing rise in child jihadism. Young boys and at times girls are being indoctrinated into violent fundamentalism and used as fighters, suicide bombers and spies.
Something similar is happening in other countries battling Islamist insurrections. Commanders of al Qaeda’s branches in Yemen, Somalia and Mali have deployed youngsters. Islamic State has used children in combat, suicide bombings and in execution videos in Iraq and Syria.
Interviews with 16 young Nigerians who escaped from Boko Haram captivity and with other witnesses, soldiers, researchers, officials and diplomats in Nigeria and Cameroon provide a picture of the harrowing life endured by the children who wage jihad. The Wall Street Journal isn’t publishing their surnames.
Witnesses said the boys were trained and sent into battle, at times unarmed and often numbed with opiates. Many of the boys were beaten and some died of starvation or thirst, these people said. Their individual accounts couldn’t be independently verified but are consistent with information gathered by researchers and military officials, both in terms of timing and specific details.
“They told us, ‘It’s all right for you to kill and slaughter even your parents,’ ” recalled Samiyu, a former captive who said he witnessed a beheading on the first day of his 11 months with Boko Haram. He said other boys helped hold down the victim. “They said, ‘This is what you have to do to get to heaven.’ ”
People displaced by fighting between Nigerian troops and Boko Haram militants have settled in a camp on the outskirts of Maiduguri, Nigeria.
Witnesses recounted Boko Haram using fleets of passenger vans to move child fighters through the forests of northeastern Nigeria. Some have described camps of more than 1,000 boys and adolescents training to fight, with very few adults present.
“If you go there, you can see 12-year-olds talking about burning down a village,” said Fatima, a 20-year-old former hostage. “They have converted.”
As more such boys escape from the group and others are captured by government forces, West African officials are debating whether the boys can be returned to their families—and how.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Nigerian peacekeepers helped end the civil war in Liberia, and thousands of young boys were disarmed and returned to society. Some of those peacekeepers are now ranking officers. They must confront a new generation of child combatants raised on an ideology more apocalyptic than anything offered by the warlords of 1990s Liberia.
Boko Haram recruited children from the earliest days of its insurgency. First it tapped them as spies and couriers before shifting toward front-line mobilization, according to Nigeria’s military and Human Rights Watch. CONTINUE AT SITE
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