Suicide bombers kill over 30 in Cameroon and Nigeria

A child and a middle-aged woman were deployed as suicide bombers in the Far North Region of Cameroon and in Yobe state in Nigeria over the weekend. The two attacks killed at least 34 people and wounded more than 100 others. No group has yet to take responsibility for the bombings, but the Islamic State’s West Africa province (ISWA), formerly known as Boko Haram, is widely suspected.

According to AFP, a 12-year-old girl detonated in a popular and crowded bar in Maroua, Cameroon, late Saturday night. The attack left 20 people dead and at least 79 people wounded. However, a local official told the Associated Press that aid workers are still counting bodies and numbers could rise. The attack in Maroua comes just three days after two other suicide bombers, two teenage girls, killed more than 20 in the Cameroonian city.

Yesterday’s attack is the fifth in three weeks in Cameroon involving female suicide bombers. On July 12, two women also detonated explosives in the town of Fotokol in the Far Northern Region, killing 13 people. The regional government banned women from wearing burkas, which ISWA often uses to mask its suicide bombers. The jihadist group has launched numerous military attacks in Cameroon’s Far Northern Region over the past several years.

In Nigeria, a woman said to be around 40 detonated herself in a crowded market in the town of Damaturu on Sunday morning. The blast killed 14 people and wounded 47 others, according to a local nurse. The woman had been described as “mentally unstable” by locals, the AFP reports.

The ISWA has deployed numerous female suicide bombers in Nigeria recently. Three suicide bombers, all women, also targeted Damaturu less than two weeks ago. Those attacks killed over 50 people during Eid festivities in the city.

On June 24, a pair of women who were thought to be in their twenties killed 30 people in separate attacks at a market and a prayer area in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. Three days earlier, another woman detonated a device at a bus station in Maiduguri, killing at least 20 people.

The tactic has been a common occurrence in Nigeria over the past two years. In one of the deadliest attacks, on Nov. 27, 2014, two women killed 78 people and wounded scores more at a market in Maiduguri. The group’s first known instance of using a female suicide bomber was on June 8, 2014, when a middle-aged woman on a motorcycle detonated near a Nigerian military barracks in Gombe, killing one policeman.

The ISWA has deployed at least 39 female suicide bombers in Nigeria and Cameroon since June 2014, according to data compiled by The Long War Journal. The use of women can make it easier for jihadist groups to conduct suicide attacks as explosives may be easier to hide, and men are less likely to search women due to cultural sensitivities.

Despite a coordinated military offensive by Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon that has targeted ISWA strongholds in the Lake Chad region, the jihadist group has maintained its attack tempo. ISWA has launched two suicide attacks in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, over the past two months, and has conducted multiple military assaults in Niger, Cameroon, and Nigeria. In one particularly gruesome attack, ISWA gunmen assaulted two mosques in the town of Kukawa in Borno as worshippers were praying. At least 97 people, many of them children, are reported to have been killed.

List of Islamic State West Africa/Boko Haram suicide attacks utilizing women since the beginning of June 2014:

July 26, 2015 – A 40 year old woman, described as “mentally unstable,” detonated herself in a crowded market in Damaturu, Nigeria, killing 14.

July 25, 2015 – A 12 year old girl killed 20 people in a suicide bombing on a popular bar in Cameroon.

July 22, 2015 – Two girls killed at least 20 people in separate suicide bombings in Maroua, the capital of Cameroon’s Far Northern Region.

July 17, 2015 – A 10 year old girl and an elderly woman killed 50 people in separate suicide attacks in Damaturu, Nigeria.

July 16, 2015 – A young woman suicide bomber killed at least nine people as they gathered to mark the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr in Damaturu.

July 12, 2015 – Two women suicide bombers killed 10 civilians and a Chadian soldier in an attack in the Cameroon border town of Fotokol.

July 7, 2015 – A woman killed at least 20 people after detonating her vest in a crowd of Nigerian government workers in Zaria.

July 7, 2015 – A female suicide bomber detonated her explosives after she was stopped at a roadblock in Zaria.

July 3, 2015 – A teenage woman suicide bomber killed 12 worshippers when she blew herself up in a mosque in Malari in northeastern Nigeria.

July 3, 2015 – A woman suicide bomber killed five people at a Christian church in Potiskum, Nigeria.

July 1, 2015 – The Nigerian military said that six women suicide bombers killed scores of civilians and one soldiers in separate attacks in the village of Zabamari Muna near Maiduguri.

June 24, 2015 – A girl, who is thought to have been 12-years-old, killed 10 people after detonating her explosive vest at a market in Yobe state, Nigeria.

May 16, 2015 – A woman killed 10 people in a suicide attack in Damaturu, Nigeria.

March 12, 2015 – A woman killed at least 34 people after detonating an explosive device at a market in Maiduguri.

Feb 22, 2015 – A young girl killed five people and wounded dozens more in a bombing at a security checkpoint outside a market in Potiskum.

Feb 15, 2015 – A woman killed at least seven people in a bombing at a crowded bus station in Damaturu.

Feb 12, 2015 – A woman killed seven people in a suicide attack at a crowded market in Nigeria’s Borno state.

Jan 10, 2015 – A female suicide bomber killed 19 in an attack in Borno.

Dec 10, 2014 – Two female suicide bombers kill four in Kano.

Dec 1, 2014 – Two women suicide bombers kill five in Maiduguri.

Nov 26, 2014 – Two women suicide bombers killed 45 people at a crowded market in Maiduguri.

Nov 16, 2014 – A woman suicide bomber killed at least 12 in an attack at a cellphone market in Azare, Nigeria.

Nov 12, 2014 – A woman suicide bomber detonated her vest at a teacher training college in Kontagora in Nigeria’s central Niger State.

July 31, 2014 – A woman killed three people after detonating her explosives at a college in Kano, Nigeria.

July 30, 2014 – A teenage girl killed six people after blowing herself up among a crowd of students at a college campus in Kano.

July 28, 2014 – A young woman killed three people after detonating her bomb at a kerosene queue in Kano.

July 28, 2014 – A teenage girl injured six people after detonating a bomb at a shopping centre in Kano.

July 27, 2014 – A teenager with an explosive device concealed under her veil detonated her bomb up at a university campus in Kano, injuring five police officers.

June 25, 2014 – A woman detonated her bomb after parking her car next to a gasoline tanker at a fuel depot in Lagos, Nigeria.

June 8, 2014 – A middle-aged woman killed a policeman in a suicide attack at a military barracks in Gombe, Nigeria.

Caleb Weiss is an editor of FDD's Long War Journal and a senior analyst at the Bridgeway Foundation, where he focuses on the spread of the Islamic State in Central Africa.

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4 Comments

  • Oberron says:

    http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/2015/07/turkey-could-tip-syria-balance-as-kurdish-villages-shelled/

    Erdogan is going after all PKK Branches now. At this rate he may just impose a no-fly zone unilaterally in Syria to get his base back on the reservation or at least get MHP to shack up with him so he doesn’t have make a distasteful deal with CHP.

    It seems Erdogan has had enough of Obama’s incompetence kicking the can down the road, supporting terrorist organizations to fight terrorist organizations so they can later go on being the new threat. In which case good for him, I wish him luck cleaning up Clinton’s Bush’s, and Obama’s combined mess. Those three are all equally responsible for this ever escalating Long War and I hope they live interesting lives the rest of their days for all the screwups they made and the unnecessary deaths they caused by their actions and inactions.

  • Meso says:

    You are missing 3 bombings in December 2014.

  • mike merlo says:

    Cameroon would have been a good locale for the US to have set up a Military Base. Then again not much positive seems to be happening out of Uganda

  • mike merlo says:

    @ Oberron

    I look forward to Putin to taking back Constantinople & shipping the Turks back to Central Asia

Iraq

Islamic state

Syria

Aqap

Al shabaab

Boko Haram

Isis