Taliban turn children into live bombs

No worries: once they take over Pakistan, Obama will sit down and talk with them without preconditions, and straighten everything out. "Taliban turn children into live bombs," from the Daily Times, April 23 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm): TANK: Haneef Mehsud was a normal teenager who spent most of his time hanging out with friends and playing cricket before he was recruited by the Taliban and turned into a suicide bomber. Less than a month after his 17th birthday in late 2008, Haneef killed two soldiers when he rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into an army convoy on a road not far from his home in Pekai, a hamlet in the militancy-plagued South Waziristan.

“We tried to stop him when he visited his family two weeks before the attack and informed us that he was soon going to embrace martyrdom,” Haneef’s father, Ghazi Mehsud, told DPI.

Ghazi moved to the neighbouring district of Tank in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), to save his second teenage son from the influence of his fellow tribesman and local warlord Baitullah Mehsud, who he blames for Haneef’s recruitment and death.

But hundreds more children are still undergoing brainwashing at dozens of ‘suicide nurseries’ run by the ethnic Pashtun Taliban commander. Mehsud, in his 30s, has emerged as the most dangerous Taliban commander in Pakistan in recent years. He heads Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella group for around a dozen Taliban outfits and has close links with Al Qaeda. The notorious commander is believed to have been behind several dozen suicide bombings across the country, including the one that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in late 2007.

During the Bhutto case investigations, the authorities detained Aitzaz Shah, 15, in NWFP. Shah told the investigators that he was deployed as the “backup bomber” for Bhutto’s assassination by Mehsud’s men.

According to the DPI report, in January 2008, during a short offensive, the military discovered a suicide nursery in the Spinkai area of South Waziristan.

Four months later, the military showed reporters video footage of a classroom where a masked teacher taught children how to carry out a suicide attack. The children, sitting in rows, were wearing white headbands inscribed with Quranic verses. Maj Gen Athar Abbas, the army’s chief spokesman, said that soldiers had rounded up over 50 boys who were undergoing suicide attack training....