Taliban getting children to carry out suicide attacks

“The clerics told me if I did a suicide attack, I would not die”, said Shakir, who hails from Barwan village in North Waziristan, a remote Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan that is a haven for Al Qaida and Taliban militants.

Shakir attended the madrassa for only four months before he was sent out on the mission to kill ‘foreign soldiers’ in Afghanistan.

“They said, they’re only foreigners. They’ll die, and you won’t,'” he told The Chicago Tribune.

The youth, who looks younger than 14, was arrested in a car filled with explosives earlier in May in Kabul, where he is being held in detention by Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency.

“They’re using kids, they’re using drug addicts, they’re using people who are mentally ill, mentally challenged,” said Humayun Hamidzada, the spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The Taliban have denied using children as suicide bombers, saying they have plenty of adult volunteers, but NATO and Afghan government officials have for the past year accused the militants of misusing children and therefore committing war crimes.

Last summer, Karzai pardoned a 14-year-old Pakistani boy who planned a suicide attack in Afghanistan after being recruited in a Pakistani madrassa.

Last June, militants in the southeastern Afghan city of Ghazni forced a six-year-old boy to wear an explosive-laden vest and told him to walk up to US soldiers.

After asking Afghan soldiers for help, the boy said he was told that when he pressed the button, flowers would shoot out, officials said at the time.

Militants on both sides of the border appear to be using young people for their attacks. One of the first suspects arrested following the assassination of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto was a youth aged 15 who hailed from near the tribal areas of Pakistan.

A video circulated on the Internet in 2007 showed a boy from remote southwestern Pakistan, near Afghanistan’s border, cutting off the head of a man accused of being a US spy.

The boy was purportedly 12 years old and the incident drew condemnation from Pakistani officials and international organisations like UNICEF.

In February, the Pakistan Amy found evidence of militants training children age nine to 15, said military spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas.

After overrunning a training camp in South Waziristan, soldiers recovered videos of teachers telling about 15 children why they should become suicide bombers.

“It is easy to bend the mind of a child, particularly those whose families have been affected in the violence,” Abbas said. “They become prey.”

The Pakistan Army has rescued several children from the settled areas near South Waziristan who were kidnapped by militants to become suicide bombers, he said.

Shakir now says he doesn’t want to attack anyone. “I don’t even know what jihad is. I really want to go home.”