The intrepid mujahedin, bravely outsourcing the jihad to children. “New West Point report details meticulous training Taliban kids go through at Pakistani terror school,” by James Gordon Meek for the New York Daily News, March 28:
WASHINGTON – Pakistani terror camps are teaching children the three R’s: reading, ‘riting and rage.
Taliban suicide schools dotting the Af-Pak tribal belt leave no child behind in the deadly lessons.
Graduates don’t go to college – they blow themselves to bits in Afghanistan to find paradise.
Since 2005, when the Haqqani Taliban introduced suicide bombings in the Afghan war, kids have become a messenger of choice.
The suicide schools aren’t new, but the processes of recruiting, training and operations are detailed in a grim new report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.
The tiny Taliban enrolled in Pakistani camps dotting the battle-scarred landscape go through a curriculum not unlike their American counterparts – but with a violent twist.
A typical day for the mostly Pashtun “fidai” – suicide bombers, who call other jihadis “common mujahids” – begins before dawn in camps numbering no more than 35 “students.”
The black-turbaned recruits – typically 12 or 13 years old, with some as young as 7 – recite Koran verses until morning prayers.
They eat together, and then “driver’s ed” takes on a sinister new meaning, according to writer S.H. Tajik, a United Nations law enforcement official, in the latest “CTC Sentinel.”
Tajik drew his information from Pakistani government interrogations of nabbed jihadis.
“After breakfast, most trainees receive driver’s education and practice vehicle maneuvers … in preparation for vehicle-borne suicide attacks,” he explained.
At one school, “six station wagons were available for this,” Tajik wrote, citing detainees grilled by officials in Islamabad. The kids clean camp until lunch, take a nap, then take more “outdoor driving lessons after having tea with cookies.”
“I want to grow up with military training, to participate in fighting and, Allah willing, to perform a martyrdom operation,” said a pint-size wanna-be in a 2008 Islamic Jihad Union video found by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Many never grow up. They are sent to bomb U.S. and coalition targets in neighboring Afghanistan. Other kids are reclaimed by their families – though some run away and return to the Taliban schools.
“There was good food, pocket money, good friends and vehicles for driving,” captured trainee Abid Mehsud said in his confession, the report says.
Terror groups on both sides of the border have hardly made the training and use of child suicide bombers a secret and have released videos about them as recently as January.
“Sick bastards,” said one U.S. official, who confirmed that the West Point report generally rang true….