Boko Haram crisis: Nigeria's female bombers strike

Nigeria's militant Islamist group Boko Haram is accused of unleashing a new weapon of war - the female suicide bomber, fuelling concern that its insurgency has entered a more ruthless phase.

Four of them - all teenage girls - carried out attacks in the biggest northern city, Kano, last week, leading to social media sites going viral with speculation - dismissed as unfounded by the government - that Boko Haram had turned some of the more than 200 schoolgirls abducted in April into human bombs.
At the same time, government spokesman Mike Omeri said the security forces had arrested three people in neighbouring Katsina state - including two girls aged 10 and 18 - with explosive belts strapped around them.
Nigeria's first female bomber - a middle-aged woman - struck in June: Riding a motorcycle, she went to a military barracks in the north-eastern city of Gombe, where she detonated her explosives while being searched at a checkpoint, killing one soldier.
To use female suicide bombers is the most dramatic strategy that an organisation can use. It becomes easier to penetrate targets because we are less suspicious about women," Martin Ewi, a researcher with South Africa's Institute for Security Studies (ISS), told the BBC

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When you have female suicide bombers, the security challenge becomes bigger - it means you need female officers at every check-point to search women”

Martin Ewi ISS researcher

"It also shows desperation - and tends to be the last card that an organisation plays. But we don't know whether Boko Haram has reached that stage, or whether it has decided to play the card early," he adds.

Either way, Boko Haram has sent a chilling warning to the Nigerian government over its refusal to negotiate a prisoner swap by releasing of some of the group's jailed commanders in exchange for the freedom of the abducted schoolgirls.
"It may be a way of saying that if there is no prisoner exchange, then you might see some of the girls coming back with bombs," Mr Ewi says.
Nigeria-based security analyst Bawa Abdullahi Wase says Boko Haram has now carried out 11 suicide bombings - by men and women - since launching its insurgency in 2009, suggesting that it is copying the tactics of jihadi groups in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
But he rules out the possibility that the group's suicide squads are receiving training abroad, saying: "You will be chasing shadows if you think that."