Sacrificing the children

Hamida Ghafour and Ayesha Nasir

• Last Updated: October 17. 2009 1:29AM UAE / October 16. 2009 9:29PM GMT

Very little is known about the boy. He may have been 12, 13, or 14. His handlers identified him by a code name and convinced him that he was carrying out God’s work. His parents may not even be aware of his fate.

On Monday, as a Pakistani security convoy sped past the bazaar in the Shangla district of the Swat valley, he stepped off the edge of the kerb, flung himself at the vehicles and set off an explosion, killing himself and 41 others.

In the subsequent days the shock of the child suicide bomber was swept away by other fears as Pakistan cowered under a persistent bombardment by Taliban insurgents who have staged attacks against police, army and intelligence services all over the country, including three in the second largest city, Lahore.

The carnage of the past two weeks has left 150 people dead.

Several of the gunmen in Lahore were also teenagers, highlighting a disturbing trend in which the Taliban are recruiting young boys to carry out suicide missions and other terrorist attacks.

While the notorious madrasa system has been a wellspring for the radicalisation of Pakistani and Afghan youth since the days of the Soviet jihad, Islamist leaders, analysts and American military officials in both countries say they are seeing a sinister new development in which young children are being taken from their villages and forced to undergo training as suicide bombers.

The children, some as young as six, are considered disposable in the increasingly nasty war between the Pakistani and Afghan governments and the insurgents trying to overthrow the two states.

“The thinking is that these kids are very young and extremely vulnerable, which is why we need to get work out of them immediately,” says a recruiter for Lashkar-i-Taiba, a violent Pakistani jihadist outfit who did not want his name to be published.

“These kids are also more likely to spill the beans or have a change of heart and this is why we only use them as bombers.”

Statistics are difficult to come by but children represent only a small minority of suicide bombers. However, their psychological impact on people is devastating.

“Employing children as perpetrators of suicide attacks is an even more effective instrument of psychological warfare than using an adult attacker,” says Christine Fair, author of a 2007 UN report on suicide bombs in Afghanistan. “Indistinguishable from the other children, the spectre of the child attacker is as terrifying as it incomprehensible.”

The main clearing houses for the young recruits straddle the porous Afghan-Pakistan border with many deep inside North and South Waziristan.

In some cases poor Pakistani parents are paid 1,000 rupees (Dh80) a month, a huge sum, to allow their sons to stay in the madrasa where, after a long period of rote memorisation of the Quran, the use of weapons is slowly introduced. The teachers look for children with the right attributes – malleable or emotional youngsters. When they find one, the recruiters from the loose network of jihadist groups in the tribal areas are alerted.

There are 15 to 20 local militant groups operating in South Waziristan and perhaps 12 in North Waziristan.

“The children don’t really know what they have been chosen for or where they are going,” the Laskhar-i-Taiba recruiter adds.

“The child is simply told that he is being sent for advanced studies. Usually the parents are also given such a story and given money to keep their mouths shut. Not in Lahore, but in some cities children are kidnapped and taken to training camps without their parents or anyone else knowing where they have gone.”

The Shangla district suicide bomber may have been trained at a madrasa in the Taliban-controlled town of Dera Ismail Khan, which serves as the gateway from North West Frontier Province to the Punjab region where insurgents have concentrated this week’s attacks.

Children as young as four years old are far from home, shut up inside a classroom all day and eager to please their teachers in a culture that values obedience. All of this makes it easy to train their personalities. To prepare them for their sacrifice, they are told that they will go to paradise or that foreigners are occupying their lands. “In madrasas, a student can’t even stand straight in front of his teacher, he always stands slightly bowed with his hands tied in front because he thinks it’s an honour to be able to touch his teacher’s feet or shoes,” says Qari Qavi, a madrasa leader in Multan, a city in Punjab. “Due to such training when we tell them to blow themselves up or attend a certain training camp they can’t even dream of saying no.”

Across the border in Afghanistan, where the Afghan branch of the Taliban insurgency controls most of the southern provinces, American army officials have reported that children are being taken from their homes.

In 2007, in the Andar district of Ghazni province, Taliban fighters took boys aged between eight and 12 to madrasas on the Pakistan side of the border to be trained for suicide missions. In another village nearby, between five and 10 boys were being lost each year.

These are not the educated and well-motivated fighters allied with al Qa’eda fighting in Iraq. Afghan officials speak of “Mullah Omar’s missiles”, young peasants who are illiterate, bribed or tricked into blowing themselves up. In some cases they are offered motorcycles or mobile phones.

“Sometimes they are sent forward to the madrasas because they are disposable or a problem child, or sometimes parents send them with the best of intentions because they can’t afford to send them to school and the madrasas are free,” says an American military intelligence analyst working in southern Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Afghan Taliban have in the past denied recruiting children. According to the Taliban’s military rule book, The Layeha, rule 19 states that “mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair on to the battlefield”.

The propaganda aimed at youngsters is carefully orchestrated. The Pakistani militant group Jaish i Mohammed has an online magazine, Musalman Bachay, which sends the simple message that martyrdom is a good way to earn the approval of parents and teachers. A recent edition told the story of young boy named Noman who said he wanted to be “a mujtahid like brother Usman and kill the enemies of Islam” to his mother’s great joy.

In Afghanistan however, it is different picture.

“I have never seen a call for suicide bombs and a lot of that has to do with Afghan people’s view of suicide attacks,” says the American intelligence analyst. “Videos calling for suicide bombs would not be well regarded here by the people. A lot of the propaganda we get says ‘Stay out of our way’ and ‘Don’t get involved with Coalition forces’.”

As is Pakistan, recruitment of attackers is drawn from the refugee population rather than those settled in the cities.

There are little or no opportunities for parents in southern Afghanistan to send their sons to a school where they can be guaranteed to be free of influence from insurgent propaganda.

Those who wish to help set up schools are kept away by threats from the Taliban, says Jonathan Hoffman, of Direct Aid International, a small aid organisation that has built 11 schools in the central mountain region of Hazarajat. “I have avoided improved explosive devices laid out for me,” he said. “I was in one area where there were Talib supporters who wanted to give me a welcome of their own. It is an area where I agreed and funded the building of an eight-room school for girls. To date I have not visited the village again due to the possible repercussions for the school and villagers.”

He added: “I have seen numerous villages that are in desperate need of a new school or supplies. The teachers in most of my schools have no formal college-level education, especially around the art of teaching. As I understand it, most of the teachers are hired from local high schools as they graduate from the 12th grade.”

The most spectacular and high-profile attacks in Afghanistan tend to be organised by highly trained al Qa’eda professionals. The 2007 bombing outside Bagram Air Base in Kabul during a visit by Dick Cheney, the former American vice president, was one such attack.

In most cases children fail in their mission.

Two months ago, a mentally ill boy walked into a busy Afghan market in Kabul with a wheelbarrow full of explosives and ended up only killing himself.

But other cases are even more heartbreaking.

In June 2007, a boy aged six walked up to a puzzled guard at an American military base in Ghazni province and pointed to his vest laden with explosives. The anxious little boy said he had forgotten what he was supposed to do with it.

The vest did not detonate.

hghafour@thenational.ae