Know Your Enemy

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

This is translated from a Pakistani news article, so its a bit disjointed. Read it through and you'll get the picture...

Pak Jihadis training children as"future terrorists"!

Islamabad -- Pakistan's military has said that foreign militants are kidnapping children and training them as "future terrorists" in the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan.

Khalid is also one of the several such teenagers who have been receiving jihadi training from the militants. So indoctrinated have these children become with the aspect of jihad, that without even understanding the implications a religious intolerant group like the

Taliban will have on society, they are vociferously espousing jihad and the establishment of a puritan Islamic government based on Sharia in Afghanistan.

"I want Islam, the government of Taliban. The entire world understands that the Taliban is a true Islamic government. I know that Osama bin Laden is a good man," Khalid was quoted as saying.

Even military officials acknowledge that the children though seem innocent to the eye are in fact the terrorist of the future generations.

" First of all, you will probably be perturbed by the thought that children who are not even capable of wiping their noses, so how can they be terrorists? They are the future terrorists. They are terrorists of the future," Lt General Safdar Hussain, the military

chief of Pakistan NWFP was quoted as saying by a foreign news agency.

He further added that terrorists have as part of their plan to escape suspicion from the authorities started using young children for their clandestine activities.

"So these are the best people to be used for terrorism, because no one can suspect that such a small child can be involved in terrorist activities. Or if he is travelling from Point A to Point B, I think one would be embarrassed to search him because what could one expect to find on the child? Therefore they are using these tactics of bringing these small children here, and making them do things in such a way that the snake is clubbed to death but the club is not damaged," he added.

Khalid, who was just like any other teenager before he was abducted from his home in Tajikistan along with four of his school mates while they were on their way to school in their village about 45 minutes drive from the Tajik capital Dushanbe and smuggled into the tribal

heartland of Pakistan in the mountainous region adjoining Afghanistan, has after having spent only a little of more than a month evolved into a hardline Muslim if not a through and through militant.

Military officials say that the trend is very disturbing and is probably a move by Tajik militant Qari Tahir Yuldashev, the charismatic successor of IMU leader Juma Namangani to use central Asian kids for their clandestine missions and attacks on security

forces in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Hussain further acknowledge that most of the children have either been like Khalid, kidnapped, or have been sold by their parents out of sheer poverty that plagues Tajikistan.

"All the foreigners are young boys whose average age is 16 or 17 years, and it is my assessment that most of them have either been kidnapped or they were sold," Hussain said.

Khalid who says that he has never met Yuldashev and seen him only in pictures, however does not hesitate to call him a "mujahid".

However, Pakistani officials are not taking any chances and are thoroughly interrogating these youngsters more so after the escapades of local militant leader Abdullah Mehsud, and are also initiating plans to educate and rehabilitate the children who are genuinely repentant.