DAKAR, Senegal -- As Boko Haram militants terrorize Nigeria and its neighbors with abductions and gun attacks, the group also continues to use women and girls as suicide bombers.
That was demonstrated this week when Boko Haram sent three girls to a government-run camp in northern Nigeria that was supposed to be a haven for people who had been chased from their homes under threat or attack by the group.
Posing as refugees from the violence, the girls spent the night at the camp in Dikwa. At dawn, two blew themselves up, killing 58 people and wounding 78. The third girl did not detonate her device. Authorities said she had recognized her parents and siblings among those seeking shelter at the camp and had surrendered.
The three were among dozens of women and girls who have served as suicide bombers in recent Boko Haram attacks. The United Nations estimates that since June 2014, Boko Haram has deployed 100 abducted women and girls for attacks once carried out by men. The group has also used boys as young as 8 for suicide missions.
Authorities in Dikwa have been interviewing the girl who surrendered. She has told them that Boko Haram was planning further attacks on the camp, a rapidly growing space that in September housed 7,500 people but had reached a peak of 80,000 by the end of January.
As of Thursday, the girl's precise motives were unclear.
Many experts on Boko Haram say the women and girls who are deployed have been brainwashed or are simply unaware that the devices they are carrying can kill them. Leila Zerrougui, the U.N. special representative on children and armed conflict, has said explosives worn by bombers are often remotely detonated.
Others say at least some of the women and girls, forcibly married to Boko Haram members, support the group's cause of insurgency against secularism and for the creation of a strict Islamic state.
Female bombers have proved particularly lethal largely because they can move about without arousing suspicion. Their religious gowns double as hiding places for explosives.
The camp at Dikwa is currently sheltering about 52,000 people, most of whom are women and girls. Food is sparse there, and sanitation problems are growing.
Government officials have been returning camp residents to their homes as a stepped-up military push has rooted Boko Haram members from many villages that had been their strongholds.
A senior U.S. military official said the Nigerian military is not pushing aggressively enough in the northern state of Borno, where Boko Haram originated, despite an intensified campaign by President Muhammadu Buhari. The group is hunkered down in the Sambisa Forest and doing mostly what it pleases there, which includes carrying out cross-border attacks where women have also been deployed as bombers.
In northern Nigeria, local government officials said as many as 1,000 women and girls were recently rescued from the village of Boboshe and taken to the Dikwa camp. They told officials they had been used as sex slaves.
In the past, women rescued from Boko Haram have said they were raped repeatedly, with some reporting that they thought they were being impregnated to create a new generation of Boko Haram fighters. In 2014, more than 200 girls were kidnapped from a school in Chibok, a mass abduction that generated international outrage.
Buhari recently acknowledged that the military has no idea of the whereabouts of those girls.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.
A Section on 02/12/2016