A bomb at a market in the town of Jimeta, northeastern Nigeria, has killed around 30 people, eyewitnesses told Reuters on Thursday.

The device, which an eyewitness said was planted in a three-wheeled motorized scooter inside the market in Adamawa state, was detonated around 19:00, a few minutes after a female suicide killed two people at a checkpoint in Maiduguri.

“We have evacuated 32 bodies, we are taking them to two hospitals,” a Red Cross ambulance driver, who wanted to remain unnamed, told Reuters on the telephone.

Nobody has claimed responsibility but the attacks bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, the militant Islamist group that has waged a six-year insurgency in the northeast of Africa’s biggest economy and top oil exporter in a bid to set up an Islamic state.

The bombing is the latest attack in a series of explosions in the last few days that has killed around 80 people, following the inauguration of new President Muhammadu Buhari last week.

At the start of the year Boko Haram controlled a swathe of territory around the size of Belgium, but the military says the group has been pushed back to the Sambisa forest in recent weeks, a claim which the group denied in a video aired on social media on Tuesday.

Buhari, who visited his counterparts in Niger and Chad on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the group, has vowed to defeat the militant Islamists.

Washington said it is ready to develop military cooperation with Nigeria as the country’s new President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in.

Three United Nations peacekeepers were wounded in northern Mali when a vehicle in a convoy escorting their commander and the force’s police commissioner hit a landmine on Thursday, officials said.

The incident is the latest sign of a flare up in northern Mali, where U.N. troops trying to broker peace between separatist rebels and forces allied to the Bamako government are also coming under attack from Islamist groups operating in the zone.

A spokeswoman for the U.N. mission confirmed that Force Commander Major General Michael Lollesgaard of Denmark and the police commissioner, Awale Abdounasir from Djibouti, were in the convoy when it was hit by the blast.

Radhia Achouri said the two officers were not hurt and she did not believe they were personally targeted.

“It is yet another attack in the area. They happened to be on that road at that time,” she said, referring to the road between the town of Timbuktu and Teherdge in the desert north.

A French military intervention in early 2013 drove a mix of Islamist forces from the northern towns they occupied the year before. However, insurgents continue to harass French and U.N. troops with bombings and rocket attacks.

Months of peace talks aimed at ending a Tuareg-led separatist rebellion in the north have stalled, leaving the zone awash with gunmen and smugglers. More than 35 U.N. troops have been killed in Mali since the mission deployed in mid-2013.

Nigerian President-elect Muhammadu Buhari’s promised campaign to defeat Boko Haram could drive more militants over the country’s borders, raising the need for co-operation between governments across the region, senior UN officials said on Thursday.

Speaking on the eve of the former army general’s inauguration, they voiced hope that the new Abuja government would crush the Islamist militants accused of using women and children as sexual slaves and suicide bombers

“There is this concern that success inside northeast Nigeria spells trouble for Niger, Cameroon, and even potentially Chad. So there is a lot of focus on regional cooperation,” Robert Piper, UN Assistant Secretary-General and regional humanitarian co-ordinator for the Sahel, told a news briefing.

Thousands have been killed in Boko Haram’s six-year-old insurgency in Africa’s biggest oil producer. The group has already launched attacks on the territory of Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

“The promise from the elected president as a former chief of the army to defeat Boko Haram is also good news for us. However, our expectation is also that while the army is leading the battle and war against Boko Haram, international humanitarian law and human rights will be respected,” said Munir Safieldin, UN deputy humanitarian co-odinator for Nigeria.

Boko Haram, whose name is roughly translated as “Western education is sinful” has been pushed from most of the territory it controlled in the past few months by Nigeria’s army with assistance, at times, from soldiers provided by neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

Piper said that Lake Chad is “one of the natural places where Boko Haram will seek refuge if they can”, adding: “We are watching northern Cameroon very carefully, we are watching southern Niger very carefully.

Nigeria’s armed forces killed scores of Boko Haram militants and rescued 20 women and children as part of an operation in the Sambisa forest, the group’s remaining hideout in the northeast, the military said on Saturday.

The army has freed some 700 women held by Boko Haram in recent weeks but the 200 schoolgirls abducted from the town of Chibok last year have not been among them.

“The women and girls who have been rescued from Boko Haram definitely now face a very difficult reality and many dilemmas,” said Safieldin.

“Some of these girls have been reported to be pregnant, and definitely these are unwanted pregnancies as a result of rape, and some of them have been reported to have tested HIV positive,” he said, noting that UN agencies are providing trauma counselling.

A leading figure in the Somali-based Al-Qaeda-affiliated Shabaab movement has died in Somalia, the Islamic militant group said Thursday.

In a death announcement and obituary carried by jihadist media, the Shabaab said Sheikh Hassan Abdulahi Turki, known as Hassan Turki, died on Wednesday evening in the Middle Juba region south of the capital Mogadishu. Turki was in his 70s and suffered from poor health.

“Sheikh Hassan Abdulahi Turki died last night in Hargeysa Yarey township. We pray to God to give him his mercy and accept his long-term good deeds,” Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage said in an audio message.

Rage said Turki “was one of Somalia’s greatest scholars” who had met “Al-Qaeda leaders, led by Osama bin Laden, twice in Afghanistan and another time in Sudan” and had fought against US soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, the year 18 US soldiers were killed in the so-called Black Hawk Down incident during an ill-fated intervention.

The Ethiopian-born former soldier was a veteran Islamist who played a series of leading roles in Somalia’s civil war.

Turki was a founding member of Al-Itihaad Al-Islami in the early 1990s alongside Hassan Dahir Aweys, often regarded as the godfather of Islamic militancy in Somalia. Together they also formed a successor group called Hizbul Islam.

Turki played a key role in the Islamic Courts Union, which briefly controlled Somalia in 2006, and helped establish the Shabaab which emerged in the wake of the US-backed Ethiopian invasion that ended its rule.

In 2004 the US put Turki on its list of global Al-Qaeda leaders after accusing him of involvement in the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania six years earlier. In 2008 he survived a US air strike targeting him and other militant leaders in southern Somalia.

In recent years Turki’s influence and importance waned as old age and ill-health took their toll.

The United Nations’ Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Zainab Bangura, has decried the reported rape and forced marriages of female captives of the Boko Haram.

In a statement signed by her office’s Advocacy and Women’s Rights Specialist, Letitia Anderson, Bangura lamented that one year after the abduction of the more than 276 Chibok girls’, many remained in captivity.

“I am appalled by reports that hundreds of the recently released female captives were repeatedly raped by Boko Haram militias and compelled to marry their captors. These latest revelations suggest that the Boko Haram is not only destroying existing family and community structures but is bent on controlling their future composition.

“In order to give rise to a new generation raised in their own image, they are waging war on women’s physical, sexual and reproductive autonomy and rights,” Bangura said.

“I reiterate my calls for all abducted women and girls to be immediately released from captivity and returned safely to their families.

“I call upon the government of Nigeria, with support from the international community and local organisations, to provide medical and psycho-social care for those who have been impregnated.’’

Bangura also called for the provision of treatment for women and girls infected with sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDs.

Meanwhile, Nigerien authorities said they have detained 643 people linked to the Boko Haram group since February, the Hausa service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reports.

Addressing the Nigerien parliament in Niamey, the country’s Security Minister, Hassoumi Massaoudou, said that those arrested and detained have been charged with acts of terrorism and criminal conspiracy.

“If this measure had not been taken, we could have had an uprising in the very interior of Diffa,” the minister said.

Diffa came under heavy attack in February when Boko Haram, which wants to establish an emirate in Northern Nigeria, carried out attacks in neighbouring countries.

Aisha, 9 years old, and her elder sister, Falmata, 13, were both abducted from their home in Damasak, in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, during a raid by Boko Haram militants in March. Their much older brother, Bukkar, isn’t sure they’ll ever return. He believes they might have been drafted into the insurgents’ growing army of female suicide bombers. Indeed, he has every reason to think so.

When militants invaded Damasak, they burned down houses and demanded children be handed over to them. Parents who objected were killed, and eventually hundreds of children—girls in particular—were taken by force.

“They set our house on fire and walked through the streets kidnapping children who were under 15 years of age and killing those who were above that age,” Bukkar remembers. “They were most interested in little girls, whom they plan to use as suicide bombers.”

Boko Haram has become notorious for using young female suicide bombers. The majority of those recognized have been adolescent girls, with some as young as 10. Other young women are forced to become soldiers and sex slaves.

“Militants feel it is easier to intimidate and brainwash young girls than adult women. Besides, these girls come cheap, and most of them are extremely loyal,” says Yusuf Mohammed, who works with young people affected by trauma in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram.

The use of these young women began not long after more than 200 young women were kidnapped from their school in Chibok last year, an incident that provoked global outrage and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign that, so far, has proved fruitless.

The corresponding time frame and the age of the suicide bombers killed and captured since then have prompted speculation that Boko Haram has enlisted some of the kidnapped girls from Chibok in its jihad. The alleged bomber in a July 2014 attack at a university in Kano bore a marked resemblance to one of the abducted schoolgirls.

There’s a strong possibility that after more than a year in captivity, some of the Chibok girls could have been indoctrinated by their kidnappers to carry out suicide attacks, but there’s no clear evidence that this is the case. The government believes the Chibok girls are still more or less together and being held by the terrorists in a secret location. Meanwhile Boko Haram has abducted hundreds of young women and girls in other towns and villages in Nigeria’s northeastern region.

According to local sources, Boko Haram operates suicide bombing training camps in Kirenuwa town in Marte, 112 kilometers north of Maiduguri, and in the Kala Balge area in northern Borno. Those are in addition to parts of the deadly Sambisa forest, where the Nigerian military is carrying out an offensive against the insurgents.

These same local sources say that when women are abducted by the militants the “young and smart” girls are separated from the older ones and trained on how to handle heavy weapons or carry out suicide attacks, or both.

This month, soldiers who spoke on condition of anonymity said they were shocked when women opened fire on troops who had come to rescue them in Sambisa forest. The women, they said, killed seven soldiers. A dozen women died in the firefight.

Indoctrinated female bombers are persuaded to seek martyrdom for fighting God’s cause.

“They repeatedly told us that the best jihad is the one in which your horse is slain and your blood is spilled,” said Rukaya, 13, who was rescued by Niger’s armed forces from a Boko Haram camp in Bosso, in southeastern Niger along the border with Nigeria, then taken to a camp for displaced persons in Diffa, deeper in Niger’s territory.

In the past, Boko Haram gave financial incentives to its bombers. In its first-ever suicide attack—a 2011 bombing at the police headquarters in the national capital of Abuja—Boko Haram was reported to have offered the male suicide bomber the equivalent of $24,870 for the operation, which he bequeathed to his four children.

It is doubtful that the rising number of female bombers or their families received any such largesse.

Over the past 13 months, there has been a huge rise in female suicide bombings and huge increase in casualties as well. The attacks have claimed up to 78 victims. Boko Haram’s first female bomber was a woman believed to be in her early twenties who rode a motorcycle into military barracks and blew herself up at a checkpoint in the northeastern city of Gombe last June. In its latest suicide attack, at least seven people were killed and 33 others seriously wounded when a female bomber, believed to be 10 years old, blew herself up at a bus station on May 16 in Damaturu, the capital of Nigeria’s northeastern Yobe State.

Last week, the Borno State deputy governor said Boko Haram had deployed more than 600 women throughout Maiduguri, with the goal of carrying out suicide bombings in the metropolis. While this number is completely unfeasible, female terrorists have had the advantage that, previously at least, they attracted less attention from authorities and could move about largely unquestioned: the long hijab, or covering, worn by Muslim women can easily hide bombs, and strict standards of morality make it hard for male security officers to search female suspects. Last November, two women dressed in full hijabs, which covered everything but their faces, entered a busy Maiduguri market and detonated explosives, killing more than 40 people. A 20-year-old woman, who was one of the suicide bombers, had a bomb tied firmly to her back in the same manner used by many women to carry their children in northern Nigeria.

More recently, as vigilance in the region has increased, some women—particularly teenage girls—have given up the full-length covering for fear they’ll be mistaken for terrorists. They still wear hijab, but the veils are shorter and lighter, or mere head coverings along with simple dresses, so that anyone can see there are no explosives on them.

Meanwhile, the government says the search for the Chibok girls goes on, and continues to heap skepticism on suggestions that they may have been pressed into the ranks of Boko Haram’s women bombers. In an interview on Nigeria’s African Independent Television in March, President Goodluck Jonathan, who lost his reelection bid, argued that Boko Haram would have been only too happy to display the corpses of the Chibok girls for propaganda purposes if they had been killed.

“They are still alive, because when terrorists kill they display,” Jonathan said. “But we can’t just move in with artilleries and clear the place because they may use them as shields, so we are working with the global best practices.”

Kashim Shettima, who is the governor of Borno, said the abducted girls have been kept in bunkers, inside Sambisa forest. “We are suspecting that the Chibok girls are living with the insurgents in bunkers,” Shettima said in a statement presented at a conference on security last week, I think the military must carry out their operations beneath the surface of the earth.” He said Boko Haram is also “known to have dug tunnels to enable them to move from house to house. So, having been left unchallenged for such a long time, such possibilities cannot be ruled out, which poses serious obstacles within the forest.”

With many theories suggesting that the Chibok girls are been kept in the deadly forest, only a complete and effective elimination of the terrorists there can ascertain whether or not the now-famous girls are dead or alive. (source Awdnews)

A Bangladeshi peacekeeper was shot dead and another wounded, the United Nations said on Tuesday, in the second attack in days in Mali’s capital on what is considered the world’s most dangerous UN mission.

A statement from Minusma, the UN’s peacekeeping force in Mali, said “an incident” involving one of its vehicles took place in the area of Bamako airport.

“One peacekeeper was wounded, another succumbed to his injuries,” the statement said, adding that an investigation would determine the “exact circumstances of the incident.”

A Malian security source told the reporter overnight on condition of anonymity that the soldiers were targeted by “unidentified armed men” but that account was thrown into doubt by an initial inspection of the UN vehicle.

“We have launched an investigation to find out what exactly happened since, on the face of it, there are no bullet holes, just traces of blood, in the vehicle,” the source later clarified.

Bangladesh is the largest contributor to the 10,000-strong mission, with more than 1,700 troops and police on the ground.

One of the peacekeepers, both ranked as privates, died on the scene and the other was rushed immediately to hospital with bullet wounds after the ambush on their SUV, the Bangladesh army said.

With 35 peacekeepers killed in combat since Minusma’s inception in 2013, the UN has described northern Mali as the deadliest place on Earth for its personnel.

The force is regularly attacked by militants in the north, but had not been a direct target in Bamako before an assailant opened fire on a Minusma residence in the city’s Faso Kanu neighbourhood on Wednesday last week, wounding a civilian guard.

No group has claimed responsibility for either attack, but they come at a time of strained relations between the government and Minusma, which has complained that its impartiality has been “regularly called into question.”

Reacting to criticism of the mission by Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, the force said on May 15 that “neither its contribution nor its sacrifices are accorded their proper value.”

Keita’s broadside came at the end of a speech by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, read out in Bamako by the UN’s chief peacekeeper Herve Ladsous, lamenting serious violations of ceasefire agreements “on all sides.”

Islamist militants from Somalia attacked two police patrols in neighboring Kenya yesterday, triggering a gun battle in a rural area hit by a string of cross-border raids, both sides said. Somalia’s Al Shabaab fighters said they had killed 25 Kenyan officers, an account contradicted by the police force that said one of its men had died and four had been wounded.

The Al-Qaeda-linked militants said they ambushed the police about 70 km north of Garissa, a town where the Islamists raided a university and killed 148 people in April. Al Shabaab militants, fighting to overthrow a Western-backed government in Somalia, have launched several attacks inside Kenya, trying to force it to pull troops from a African peacekeeping force in their homeland. The assaults have piled political pressure on the Nairobi government, which has promised to carry on with its Somali mission, and devastated Kenya’s tourism industry, one of its main sources of foreign income.

Police said one officer had died from his wounds after the attacks in the Fafi and Yumbis areas, one was critically wounded and three others suffered minor injuries. “A contingent of officers responded for reinforcement and on arrival at the scene, engaged the attackers in a heavy firefight,” Inspector General Joseph Boinnet said in a statement. Kenyan media had earlier reported that as many as 20 officers could have been killed, and Al Shabaab said 25 died. “We took all their weapons.

There were some Kenyan forces that escaped in the course of the ambush fighting,” al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, said. Somali and African troops have pushed al Shabaab out of Somalia’s main cities in recent years. But yesterday’s attacks underlined militants’ continuing ability to strike Kenya’s frontier regions. Last week, Al Shabaab attacked Yumbis and hoisted its flag on a mosque where fighters held prayers before heading to another nearby village.

Al Shabaab has killed more then 400 people on Kenyan soil since Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta came to power in April 2013. Kenyan anti-terrorism forces arrested a “wanted terror suspect” in possession of a Russian-made hand grenade, bomb detonator and plastic explosives in the port city of Mombasa on Tuesday, county police commander Robert Kitur said.