Militants linked to al-QaÂ’eda have set up training camps in Pakistan to teach children how to conduct suicide attacks. The Pakistani army claimed today to have overrun one such camp in territory where the notorious Pakistani Taliban commander, Baitullah Mehsud, operates.
Militants had transformed a government-run school near the village of Spinkai in South Waziristan into what one officer described as a “nursery for preparing suicide bombers”.
The school was part of a large compound above the village that included a small mosque.
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Maj Gen Tariq Khan, the commander of the division that captured the area, said: “It was like factory that had been recruiting nine to 12-year-old boys and turning them into suicide bombers.”
He told the Dawn newspaper that at another location military investigators found film footage on a DVD that they believed depicts children at the school being taught suicide training.
The footage, which was shown to journalists, contained images of a masked teacher instructing rows of schoolchildren who wore white headbands inscribed with Quranic verses.
The teacher pointed at the blackboard while an armed guard stood alongside and discussed what to carry in a suicide attack.
Maj Gen Athar Abbas, the army’s chief spokesman, said that the school and a hospital had been taken over by militants “to prepare children for suicide attacks and for making IEDS [improvised explosive devices]”.
The general said that during operations in the area soldiers had rounded up over 50 boys who were undergoing suicide attack training.
He said that many of the boys had been kidnapped. Most of them were from the ethnic Pushtun belt of the North West Frontier Province and that some were locals from South Waziristan.
“The boys were handed to an NGO [non-governmental organisation] to be looked at,” said Maj Gen Abbas.
He added that in the operation in January the army found jackets and ball bearings used for use in suicide attacks.
Mehsud has emerged over the past year as PakistanÂ’s most notorious militant commander, blamed for a wave of suicide attacks across the country, and has links with al-QaÂ’eda.
He is the head of a network dubbed the Pakistani Taliban - as opposed to the Afghan Taliban - and is accused by Pakistani officials and the CIA of masterminding Benazir BhuttoÂ’s assassination.
According to a military official the suicide training squad was organised by a notorious lieutenant of Mehsud, Qari Hussain, who was in charge of indoctrination.
Amir Rana, an expert on PakistanÂ’s jihadi groups, said that Hussain hails from a sub-section, or lesser clan, of the Mehsud tribe.
He has been held responsible for taking hostage more than 200 soldiers in the area last year.
He is also linked to Sipah-i-Sahaba, a Sunni sectarian group, and was blamed by some security sources for beheading a Shia Muslim soldier.
Since January last year Pakistan has witnessed over 80 suicide attacks that have killed more than 1,000 people. Many of the suicide attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan - some reported to have involved teenagers and even younger children - have also originated on the Pakistani side of the border.
A Taliban militant group yesterday claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed at least 11 people at the gate of an army base in PakistanÂ’s volatile northwest on Sunday.