Boko Haram has extended its campaign of genocide to affixing suicide vests to girls and ordering them to commit mass murder. Last weekend, the radical Islamic group in Nigeria strapped explosives to three girls about 10 years old and ordered them to detonate in a market in the town of Maiduguri and in a mobile phone store in Potiskum, killing about 22 persons.
On Jan. 3, the al-Qaeda-linked organization slaughtered up to 2,000 people in the Nigerian towns of Baga and Doron Baga.
Boko Haram echoes the Islamic State in its aspiration to create a “caliphate” across national borders by crossing into neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon. A caliphate is a form of Islamic government led by a caliph—a person who claims to be a political and religious successor to the prophet Muhammad and a leader of the entire Muslim community.
On Monday, Boko Haram fighters seized the Cameroonian border town of Kolofata; a resulting firefight with Cameroon forces left a reported 143 militants dead.
Boko Haram gained international notoriety in April 2014 when it abducted 276 girls from a boarding school in the Nigerian town of Chibok and threatened to sell them as wives and sex slaves.
A “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign began with Nigerian village women demanding government action and grew into a worldwide cry, with participants including First Lady Michelle Obama.
One week after the massacre in Baga, groups that included Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, reported that the town was razed and its inhabitants killed as they hid in the surrounding countryside. More than 3,700 structures were damaged or destroyed, according to satellite imagery before and after the attack.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan previously sent 2,000 troops armed with tanks and aircraft to the region. Boko Haram, who’s name means “Western education is forbidden,” wants to replace the Nigerian state with its own radical interpretation of Islam. They control up to 20 percent of Nigerian territory.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told CNN on Wednesday that the United States is “actively working with the Nigerians,” but added that “they (Nigerian officials) need to step up” and proceed with elections set for Feb. 14 and to not let terrorists “use the elections as a wedge between the government and its people.”
Rep. Charles Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said this week that Boko Haram is “as close to a carbon copy of ISIL as can be.” Smith has urged President Barack Obama to call the Nigerian president and insist on the need for the U.S. military to train Nigerian troops to stop the movement.
