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SLAMABAD: About 200 boys, some as young as six years, were rescued by Pakistani security forces from Taliban camps in the lawless Swat valley where they were being “brainwashed” and trained to become suicide bombers.
The troops have kept the children in Mardan area where they will go through “mental rehabilitation” with the help of psychiatrists so that they can return to a normal life.
The boys, whose age ranges between 6 and 13 years, have been so thoroughly “brainwashed” that they consider all others as “infidels”, senior North West Frontier Province minister Bashir Bilour was quoted as telling the Geo News channel. “These children have brainwashed in a way that now they even want to kill their own parents,” he said, adding, however they were not administered any drugs.
Bilour said some children were pleased when they were handed over to their parents. But, a few days later, the parents came back with complaints that the boys are now threatening to “kill them”, the report said.
Several would-be suicide bombers had been rescued from the captivity of militants, Mingora commander Brigadier Tahir Hameed also told the media.
“We are trying to bring them back on track,” he said adding, “arrangements are now being made to enrol them in schools with free boarding and lodging and give them monthly scholarships.”
He said the Taliban turned to children for using them as suicide bombers because they were easily influenced and less likely to be caught while undertaking an operation.
“They are told that the Pakistani army has become an enemy of Islam, as it is fighting for Christians and Jews,” said a senior official involved in the interrogation of potential suicide bombers who have been captured.
SLAMABAD: Even as hundreds of thousands of people stream back to the Swat Valley after months of fighting, one important group is conspicuously absent: the wealthy landowners who fled the Taliban in fear and are the economic pillar of the rural society.
About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords. Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops.
The landlords, many of whom raised sizable militias to fight the Taliban themselves last year, say the army is again failing to provide enough protection if they return. Another deterrent to returning, they say, is that the top Taliban leadership, responsible for taking aim at the landlords and spreading the spoils among the landless, remains unscathed.
The landlords’ absence may have lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining power, said Vali Nasr, an adviser to US envoy Richard Holbrooke.
“If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will be property redistribution,” he said. “That will create a vested community of support for Taliban that will see benefit in the landlords’ absence.”
