Afghan police said they have rescued a convoy of 41 children, some aged as young as six, from being smuggled over the border to Pakistan and trained as suicide bombers.
The children were stopped in a convoy of cars driven by four Afghan men in the mountainous eastern province of Kunar, police and interior ministry officials said.
They said their parents had been fooled into believing they were sending their children to religious schools across the border, but were instead being sent to be trained to attack Afghan and international forces.
“They were bringing these children in the name of education, but they were not being sent to schools,” a police official in the province said, “They were being sent to be suicide bombers”.
The children were to be taken to a madrassah at Shamshato, close to Peshawar, which officials said was a recruiting ground for militants belonging to Hizb-i-Islami, one of Afghanistan’s main insurgent factions.
However the children, when shown to local reporters, insisted they had no links with insurgents and were being sent only to receive free schooling and escape their poverty-stricken villages.
Several were from the violent Pech and Korengal valleys and had lost their fathers in clashes between American troops and insurgents, or in Nato airstrikes.
They told reporters that with their fathers gone, their families could not afford to look after them so they were being sent to private madrassahs where they would receive free food and clothes.
Afghan intelligence officials have blamed insurgents including the Taliban for launching a wave of child suicide bombers against targets in the country in the past few years.
Young boys are chosen because they are gullible and less likely to be frisked at checkpoints which would stop a grown man.
“Children are not searched. A policeman will never search a child,” explained one senior Afghan intelligence official.
Seddiq Seddiqi, spokesman for the interior ministry, said: “It was obvious what was happening with these boys. They were being taken across the border, without any paperwork or documentation, to Pakistan where there are lots of these madrassahs.
“They train these children and then they send them back to carry out attacks.”
The four men accompanying the children, Fazl Maula, Syed Habib, Samiullah and Amir Gul, were all arrested, while the boys were sent back to their families, he said.
The senior intelligence official estimated there were almost 2,000 privately-run madrassahs in the border regions. “Now most of these madrassahs are training camps,” he said.
“Pakistan’s government is trying to help us, but they don’t have access to many of these areas.”
