UNICEF said on Wednesday that an “alarming” number of children, most of them girls, have been used by Boko Haram as suicide bombers in the first months of 2017. The Islamists have increasingly been using children to attack crowded markets, mosques, and camps for internally displaced people in northeast Nigeria and the broader Lake Chad region. Experts said the number of children used in suicide attacks by Boko Haram surged to twenty-seven in the first quarter of this year, compared to nine over the same period in 2016. Since 2014, 117 children — the “vast majority” of them girls — have been used to carry out attacks in public places across Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, the UN children agency said.