Baby-Faced Bombers

http://www.homelandsecuritynet.com/HSN/2012/02/baby-faced-bombers/

Afghan police recently arrested four suspected insurgents in the process of smuggling 41 children to Pakistan from eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

According an Interior Ministry spokesperson, the insurgents were planning on using the children said to be between 6 and 11 years of age, as suicide bombers, saying: “We strongly believe that the children were being taken to Pakistan to be trained, and brainwashed then sent back as Afghan enemies.”

Children are supposed to dream of a better future and enjoy innocence and happiness, but some extremists organizations are using religious or nationalist incitement to convince children to perpetrate terrorist attacks telling them they will enjoy a life of happiness after death.

This is not an isolated incident, in 2009 Pakistani officials issued a warning that a Taliban leader, was buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets. And although most Palestinian armed groups claim to disavow the use of children in military activities, more than 10 children have carried out suicide attacks in Israel and the Occupied Territories since October 2000.

Consider that suicide bombing is becoming more popular with insurgents attempting to meet the massively intensified NATO campaign with their own surge of violence. Furthermore, Bruce Riedel, the man who chaired a review of Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy for President Obama said it best when he commented on the subject saying: “Using child suicide bombers is the grim reality of the Taliban Frankenstein that now threatens to overwhelm the Afghan and Pakistani states.”