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Nigeria's Female Suicide Bombers

Stacey Dooley meets young women who were sent on suicide bombing missions by Boko Haram, one of the world's deadliest terrorist groups, but survived to tell the tale.

Boko Haram is ranked as one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups. It’s shock tactics include the mass kidnapping of schoolgirls and the use of female suicide bombers. In the city of Maiduguri in North East Nigeria Stacey Dooley meets Falmata. She was kidnapped by Boko Haram at the age of 13, forced to marry three times and finally strapped to a suicide belt and sent out on a bombing mission. Astonishingly Falmata managed to escape to tell her painful story. But not all women in Boko have been forced to join. Some are there through choice. Ammabua believed in Boko Haram’s ideology. She volunteered for a suicide-bombing mission, which she thought would send her to paradise. Fate intervened and she survived. Now separated from Boko Haram, she is trying to reintegrate into a society of people she was once willing to kill.

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44 minutes

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