Faced with setbacks, ISWAP ramps up recruitment of child soldiers.

After suffering devastating setbacks from the Nigerian military, the Islamist State of the West African Province, an armed extremist group operating in the Lake Chad Basin, has increased its recruitment of children as fighters.

The Boko Haram faction Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS) was well-known for recruiting and using child soldiers.

However, following the Nigerian military’s recent mass elimination of ISWAP top leaders and fighters in some of their hideouts, its rival faction has been doing the same across the Lake Chad shores.

Other factors that contributed to the desperate recruitment drive included ISWAP clashes with JAS Boko Haram, which resulted in the surrender of more than 50,000 members to Nigerian authorities, as well as other factors that resulted in mass fighter desertion.

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The history of child soldiery began in 2016, when children as young as three years old were conscripted under the influence of a cleric who pretended to teach them Arabic education.

They will then undergo combat and non-combat training in the group’s “Darul Quran” radicalization camps. They were initially only sent on suicide missions, but they were later used as combatants fighters.

According to intelligence reports, the ISWAP terrorists have trained hundreds of child soldiers through its subsidiary “Albahrul Islam,” an ISIS-supported institute in Somalia, through the “Darul Ilm and Darul Qur’an” institutions.

They’ve graduated over 2,000 child militants from across Africa who went through six months of combat, non-combat operations, bomb making, martial arts, and other weapon handling technical training.

The institute opened training camps in KURNAWA, Arge, Metele, and Tumbum Allura in January 2022, with its headquarters in KAYOWA, Abadam local government area.

More than 200 newly graduated child soldiers from Lake Chad were sent as mercenaries to Mali and Niger in February 2022, to form an alliance with the Islamic State of the Greater Sahel and wage a terror campaign under the supervision of the ISIS Central Command.

The Theatre Commander of Operation Hadin Kai, Major General Christopher Musa Musa, stated that the conscription of children by Boko Haram/ ISWAP was one of the driving forces behind the atrocities.

According to Musa, the recruitment of minors is a war crime under international humanitarian law.

He added that child recruitment is destroying society and robbing children of their future, noting that women are used as sex slaves and children are forced to commit atrocities against their will.

“When we arrest them, they can spend up to three days without knowing what they’re doing because they’re under the influence of hard drugs.” This is why they have no fear of dying. So even if you shoot a Boko Haram or an ISWAP member, he won’t feel the pain right away,” he explained.

“Since 2009, Boko Haram has killed 350,000 people in northeast Nigeria, mostly women and children, and displaced over three million people in Adamawa, Yobe, and restive Borno states.