Recruiting children: Terrorist weapon to increase tension in Burkina Faso

Ahmed Adel

Terrorist groups have mastered the methods of recruiting children, especially in areas of conflict and political turmoil, where it is considered a maneuver by terrorist organizations to hide their elements because of the difficulty of tracking security for children, as they are less suspicious, which represents a great beguilement for the security services regarding the carrying out of terrorist attacks.

The number of children recruited by terrorist groups in Burkina Faso rose fivefold during 2021, up from four cases documented in 2020, according to a report by international aid and conflict experts and seen by the Associated Press.

At least 14 boys are being held in the capital, Ouagadougou, because of their alleged association with armed groups, and some of them have been there since 2018, according to Idrissa Sakho, an assistant public prosecutor in Burkina Faso at the city’s high court.

The effects of conflict on children – including their involvement in war as soldiers, but also attacks on schools and children themselves – have become so worrisome that Burkina Faso was added this year for the first time to the UN’s annual report on children and armed conflict.

Aid groups say they are seeing more children with jihadist fighters at roadside checkpoints in the Sahel, an arid region that runs through Burkina Faso but stretches directly across sub-Saharan Africa, where the West Sahel has become a hotbed of jihadist violence in recent years.

AP spoke with eight survivors, five of whom said they heard or saw children participating in the violence.

As Burkina Faso’s ill-equipped army struggles to stem the violence that has killed thousands and displaced 1.3 million people since jihadist attacks began, child recruitment experts say poverty is driving some children towards armed groups.

The main reason for some children to join these terrorist groups is poverty. Sako said that some children want money to attend school, but they join these groups because they receive promises to receive the equivalent of $18 if they kill someone, while promising other children with gifts such as scooters.

In this context, Maimouna Ba, head of operations at Women for the Dignity of the Sahel, said that there are more security operations and military violations, and therefore it is difficult for a child to wake up in the morning to see his father killed in front of his eyes, adding that when children get old, they become angry and start to question why the state has given up helping them.

But the army denied these allegations, along with accusations of being slow in responding to the attack in Solhan district, but did not make any detailed comments.

The deteriorating security situation has sparked unrest, with protests across the country calling for the government to take stronger action. In response, President Roch Marc Christian Kabore sacked the security and defense ministers and appointed himself defense minister.

In June, the United Nations and the government of Burkina Faso reported that the massacre in the northeast of the country, in which more than 130 were killed, was carried out mostly by children between the ages of 12 and 14. Militants raided the village of Solhan, opened fire on residents and burned homes.

Terrorist organizations have adopted specific mechanisms to implement their strategy of recruiting children, especially the African branches that pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda and ISIS, according to which they are able to give children the authority, strength, protection, money and capabilities that they lack in their societies, after they succeed in raising them in the jihadist takfirist ideology. At first, they subject the child to a religious educational system in which he adopts the jihadist ideology, and then they determine the skills he has that the group can employ. Some of the children characterized by emotional stability and lack of emotion are employed in flogging and execution operations. As for those who do not have any of the skills and refuse to obey instructions, they are either killed, tortured, or thrown into suicide operations.