AUN Students Teach Feed & Read Girls to Shun Suicide Recruiters

To stem the increasing incidence of female suicide bombers in the country, AUN students, under the auspices of Women Against Violent Extremism (WAVE), organized a security sensitization workshop for 150 young girls in Yola.

Led by security and counter-terrorism expert Dr. Lionel von Frederick Rawlins and AUN Senior, Miss Amina Bamalli, the workshop,  sensitized the children in Feed & Read for Girls program on how to avoid lending themselves as suicide bombers or agents for detonating explosives.

Rawlins and Bamalli said Boko Haram militants are always in search of young girls who they can brainwash and use as suicide bombers, and warned the girls to be vigilant, say No, and ensure they report any suspicious overtures and packages to their parents, teachers, or security agents.

“You must never accept or help to deliver strange packages from strangers,” Rawlins warned.  “You must value yourself and your life; you are important, and you are somebody.”

WAVE organized the security training session for girls in response to the growing number of cases of child suicide bombers in Nigeria.  According to a 2016 report by UNICEF, one in every five suicide-bombers is a child, and 75 percent of all child suicide bombers are girls as young as eight years old.  In Nigeria, Boko Haram has waged a violent insurgency since 2009 which has taken more than 50,000 lives, mostly women and children.  More recently, the militants have resorted to using mostly female suicide bombers to attack markets and city centers in Borno State and other parts of Northeast Nigeria.

WAVE’s core campaign message, tagged #IAmABeliever2, aims to promote religious tolerance in Nigeria by inspiring women and girls to value their beliefs and to take action against extremism everywhere.

The WAVE campaign is a part of the “Public Diplomacy and Strategic Media Intervention” course (CMD 412).  It is part of the Peer-to-Peer Facebook Global Digital Challenge – a global inter-university competition.  Students registered in the competition develop social and digital campaigns to challenge hateful and extremist narratives using the power of social media.  Facebook and EdVenture Partners are sponsoring the competition, which is held every semester.  CMD 412 students in the Fall 2016 semester launched the first phase of the #IAmABeliever campaign and went on to win first place at the maiden edition of the African Regional Finals in Ghana.



By Zamiyat Abubakar, CMD major