AFGHANISTAN: Boy forced by Taliban to become would-be bomber is pardoned

[KABUL, 16 July 2007] - A 14-year-old boy has described how he was forced at gunpoint by the Taliban to put on a suicide vest and attack an Afghan provincial governor, part of an apparently growing tactic by the Taliban to use children against their enemies.

Rafiqullah was pardoned by the president, Hamid Karzai, and sent home to Pakistan with $2,000 after he told of how he was recruited at a Pakistani madrassa, encouraged to cross the border on foot, and finally supplied with an explosives-laden vest. He was apprehended before he could carry out the attack.

"Today we are facing a hard fact; that is, a Muslim child was sent to madrassa to learn Islamic subjects, but the enemies of Afghanistan misled him towards suicide and prepared him to die and kill," Mr Karzai told reporters. "His family thought their child was learning Islamic studies. I pardon him and wish him a good life."

Rafiqullah's father, a poor tradesman from South Waziristan in Pakistan, had sent his son to a religious school, or madrassa, to learn the Qu'ran. Later, when he asked where his son was, the teachers there brushed him off, he said.

Threatened

When Rafiqullah balked at being given the suicide mission, he was threatened by a man named Abdul Aziz, he said.

"I said I was afraid to carry out the suicide attack. Abdul Aziz pointed a gun at me and said 'I'll kill you if you don't'," Rafiqullah told the Associated Press.

Last month a six-year-old boy in Ghazni province said that Taliban militants had forced him to put on a suicide vest and walk up to American soldiers - a potential attack foiled when the boy instead asked Afghan soldiers for help.

A gory Taliban video which surfaced in April showed militants in Pakistan instructing a boy aged about 12 as he beheaded an alleged traitor with a knife.

Rafiqullah said at least two other boys his age had been indoctrinated to carry out suicide attacks at his madrassa.

In Pakistan itself, suicide bombers struck in two areas of the north-west at the weekend, killing around 40 people and aggravating concern of a militant backlash to last week's rout of extremists at the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

Further information

• Children share the brunt of casualties in conflict (25 June 2007)
• Iraq: Mentally handicapped children used in attacks (11 April 2007)
• Taliban flee battle using children as shields (14 February 2007)
• Human Rights Watch: Lessons in Terror - Attacks on Education in Afghanistan (July 2006)