A media group associated with Boko Haram
has published two images revealing child soldiers in a military training
camp in North-East Nigeria, according to Newsweek magazine.
The organisation, al-Urwa al-Wuthaqa, shows the children dressed in dark clothes with their heads covered with garments.
In one photo, the children are seeing aiming their guns while in another they are posing with their weapons.
The Long War Journal claimed
that both young girls and boys were present in the photos, while some
were holding AK47 assault rifles, others were holding cut-outs of
weapons.
According to Max Abrahms, professor of
political science at the Northwestern University and member at the
Council of Foreign Relations, Boko Haram uses child soldiers in order to
boost its membership.
“Terrorist organisations have power in
numbers; the more members in the group, the greater its capability.
There is a correlation between the membership size of a terrorist group
and its ability to inflict bloodshed. Terrorist groups will often try to
amass the most members as possible even if they’re young boys or
girls,” he said.
Andrew Noakes, coordinator of the Nigeria
Security Network, said the group had been struggling to recruit
fighters, having “started alienating local people across northeast
Nigeria with their brutal tactics.”
He said, “To fill the gap they’ve turned to recruiting children and recruiting in neighbouring countries.
“Boko Haram often uses its child soldiers
and other forced recruits to form the first wave of an attack, before
sending in the more experienced fighters to finish off operations.”
Abrahms also believed that because the
group had ambitions of creating an eternal caliphate, in the same vein
as the ISIS, it had been indoctrinating children in the hope that its
message would be continued by the young soldiers.
“(ISIS) has ambitions in building up a
caliphate for eternity. I think Boko Haram shares this aspiration
certainly in Nigeria and the indoctrination of youths is important not
just for fielding an army against the Nigerian military, but also
breeding a future generation of like-minded sympathisers,” he said.
A number of other terrorist organisations
have resorted to using child soldiers to boost their numbers. ISIS had
previously released videos of children training at a combat camp, where
they were seen being beaten by their instructor and taught how to use a
gun.
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