Cameroon faces Boko Haram suicide bombers

Cameroon has suffered a wave of suicide bombings, thirteen in the last three months, in communities along the border with Nigeria. A region affected since 2013.

The fighters of the Islamic State group of West Africa (known as Boko Haram) attacked posts of the army, organized ambushes and planted roadside bombs. Defeated by the Nigerian military in Borno state, they now favor asymmetric type of action to confront the security forces with the help of vigilance committees.

It is in this region of Cameroon where the arrival of two young unknown girls on a donkey in a village was enough to cause panic and trigger, in an emergency, a patrol.

The men under the command of Chief Warrant Officer Marcel Amougou stalked the young girls in the evening just outside Gouzoudou, four kilometers from Mora. The search resumed the next day at four in the morning.

"The Gouzoudou market is closed because of the risk of attack, but there was a small market in a neighboring village, and it was probably their target," says the sergeant. The two girls are finally identified by mid-morning.

"We were one hundred and fifty meters, on the other side of the river, but the donkey mentioned by villagers had disappeared, so I was not sure if they were the suspects we were looking for," the Warrant Officer, father of four children, including a teenage girl barely older than the girls adds.

"There was no indication that they were suicide bombers, they had buckets on their heads as if they were returning from the fields, and it was at the time of harvesting of millet and sorghum, so there were many people," says the sergeant, who completed his military training he was thirty years ago.

The two girls were in a millet field. "I yelled stop, stop! They turned, saw that we were military, and right away, there was a big boom. The first triggered the explosive charge in her bucket, and a few seconds later the other triggered hers." One girl lost her head and her arms and the body of the other bomber was completely shredded. Soldiers picked their teeth and hair. "I have spent twenty-eight years in service, this is the most significant event in my career," admitted the officer.