Dozens of children kick up the sand underneath their sandals. They’re playing, but not with toys or balls. They are playing a game called “Boko Haram versussoja (soldier)”.
They scamper around screaming, “shoot!”, ramming their fingers into each other’s bodies. Their pointed fingertips are supposed to be the barrels of rifles or blade of swords.
They are pretending to kill each other. Some “die”, falling over like felled trees. One child collapses with his hand pressed over his heart as imaginary blood gushes out.
These children have seen the brutality of the armed group firsthand.
“Boko Haram, I see them use knife, chop my grandfather’s head,” said Ibrahim Daniel, a 13-year-old boy from Gwoza in neighbouring Borno State.
Gwoza was, and is still, a notorious hideout for the fighters. Boko Haram captured the town of nearly 300,000, in August 2014, and declared it the headquarters of what it called its Islamic Caliphate.
The Nigerian army flushed Boko Haram out of Gwoza nine months later, but Daniel is still too afraid to go back.
“The Boko Haram is something that you won’t like to see,” the young teenager says in a gruff voice.
Speaking in Nigerian slang English, he continues: “I’d like to be a soldier because anything that them [Boko Haram] do, I’d like to do back to them. If me, I see them, me I go carry them. Me I kill am.”
“I can help government. I can help my parents with being soja,” says Chinda John in the same slang, sitting beside Daniel.
Boko Haram’s campaign has had an acute impact on children.
Some of the nine-year-old students have been hearing the words Boko Haram ever since they were born.
Out of the 2.6 million people who fled their homes in fear of Boko Haram, 1.4 million of them were children, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The agency also reports that nearly one out of four suicide bombers is a child.
Source: Aljazeera
