Update: In early January, 2015, the anti-Western, anti-secular Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram used a 10 year old girl to kill shoppers at a market in Nigeria. The girl was blown up, 16 killed, and 27 injured. The group has killed thousands since 2002, and kidnapped more than 200 girls in April, 2014; the girls were never rescued or freed. June 2015 Update: The practice continues: Boko Haram uses Young Girls as Suicide Bombers in Terror Campaign.
As reported in January (2014), a young girl who was supposed to detonate a suicide vest to kill checkpoint police turned herself in after being beaten by her father for not carrying out the deed. Though the Taliban denied that young Spozhmai was sent on a suicide mission, the Afghan police believed her. Spozhmai was lucky – though beaten, she didn’t get blown to bits.
According to one source, in the first part of 2011, four children aged 8 to 14 were not so fortunate and died along with several victims when their suicide vests detonated. Other children that year had also been deployed as suicide bombers, but were stopped prior to anyone getting hurt. The Taliban, despite its denials, has been training and deploying children suicide bombers since at least 2010.
The Taliban’s use of children as suicide bombers is not only sickening, but it makes a mockery of Mullah Omar’s claim to protect children and civilians. Any political movement or army that manipulates or coerces children into becoming human bombs has lost touch with basic humanity. Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch
Another source, from 2012, gave a more detailed and disturbing account of children suicide bombers used by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the whole of 2011 (this also happens in Pakistan and can be read about here):
A senior Afghan intelligence official estimated that more than 100 had been intercepted in the past 12 months, including 20 from the Kandahar area in the south.
The largely illiterate boys are fed a diet of anti-Western and anti-Afghan government propaganda until they are prepared to kill, he said. But the boys are also assured that they will miraculously survive the devastation they cause.
“The worst part is that these children don’t think that they are killing themselves,” said the official. “They are often given an amulet containing Koranic verses. Mullahs tell them, ‘When this explodes you will survive and God will help you survive the fire. Only the infidels will be killed, you will be saved and your parents will go to paradise’.”
Moving back to the very recent past, just a day or two after Spozhmai told her story to Afghan police, a 14 year old boy stopped a child suicide bomber in his school. The teen, Aitzaz Hasan, tackled a suspicious teen at his school and the other teen’s bomb went off, killing Hasan and himself. Violence has only increased in Afghanistan and the regular populace is sick of it, and sick of their government not doing anything about it. Attacks on schools have increased and school attendance has, not surprisingly, decreased.
No doubt your thoughts are to pray for peace in Afghanistan, and for no more children, in particular, to be prey to the satanic tactics of the Taliban. We should pray about this and for the oppressed people there (and bless you for doing so), but it doesn’t hurt to know how our government (and the Western press) is handling issues like this, and the related issue – in my mind – of ignoring all the Christians being killed and displaced out of the Middle East and other Muslim countries.
It doesn’t hurt to also know what lying hypocrites groups like the Taliban are. The Taliban continue to deny they use children bombers, even though there is a great deal of irrefutable evidence against their denials. The Taliban has codes they claim to go by, and using children in this way defies their own code. It goes against the Quran as well. Yet, they are still very willing to have Muslim children killed for their cause.
The Palestinians have also done this in the past, and today train children to be suicide bombers. Yet, somehow, Israel is to blame for all the ills of the Palestinians and many Western countries are not only boycotting Israel but are increasingly antisemitic. And, our government seals its lips when it could educate, not only about the tactics of Islamists, but the post-WWII history and legitimacy of Israel as a nation and why the UN did not also grant statehood to Palestine at that time or in the years afterwards.
Our country wrings it hands and vacillates regarding Syria. It ignores the persecution and killing of Christians in Egypt. The issues are very many and a future post will outline the extermination and the apparent coming extinction of Christians from Muslim countries. Jews are already missing from the Middle East, except in Israel, and they are increasingly unwelcome elsewhere. It is now happening to Christians, too. And The West stands by, warming up to the idea. It’s now pretty easy to imagine the biblical scenario of God’s two witnesses during the end days (Revelation 11:8-10):
Their bodies will lie in the public square of the great city . . . For three and a half days some from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.
SOURCES
Teenagers recruited, trained as suicide bombers (2011)
Afghanistan: Taliban Should Stop Using Children as Suicide Bombers (2011)
Afghan boy suicide bombers tell how they are brainwashed into believing they will survive (2012)
Violence and Context in Islamic Texts (2013)
A Short History of Suicide Bombing (2013)
Taliban denies ordering 10-year-old girl to carry out suicide bombing on Helmand checkpoint (2014)
Afghanistan: Ten-year-old girl ‘forced to wear suicide vest’ (2014)
Pakistani boy who stopped suicide bomber: another Malala Yousafzai? (2014)
Boko Haram Strapped Explosives to 10-year-old girl, Killed 16 (2015)
Taliban and Government Imperil Gains for Afghan Women, Advocates Say (2014; this article is more serious and disgusting than it sounds from the title)
Israel and Palestine: A Brief History – Part I (ongoing, with various links for all of history, biographies, etc.)
With Christian Eyes 