Afghan President Hamid Karzai pardons 14-year-old failed Pakistani suicide bomber in Afghanistan July 15. (© AP Images)

19 July 2007

(President Karzai denounces Taliban’s deception, manipulation of children)

When Rafiqullah’s father Matiullah asked teachers at his son’s religious school in Pakistan if he could visit his 14-year-old son, he was told the boy’s whereabouts were unknown. 

Matiullah was not told that Rafiqullah and two other boys in his class had been separated from their peers by the Taliban, trained to drive cars and motorcycles and made to watch videos of suicide bombers carrying out attacks.  Nor was he aware that in June his son walked across the border into Afghanistan where, at gunpoint, a man named Abdul Aziz gave him a vest full of explosives with orders to kill himself and the governor of Khost province, Arsala Jamal.

The planned attack was foiled by Afghan authorities and Rafiqullah was arrested.  But rather than have the boy face imprisonment for his attempted murder, President Hamid Karzai decided June 16 to free him and provide funds to help repatriate him to Pakistan.

“Today we are faced with a fearful and terrifying truth, and that truth is the sending of a Muslim child to carry out a suicide attack.

“The enemy of Islam deceived him and prepared him to carry out a suicide attack to kill himself and other people around him,” Karzai said.

Governor Jamal, Rafiqullah’s intended victim, said his attacker was only a child.  “I don’t believe it was his idea. He was brainwashed. Actually, it was my decision to free him. I told the president he should be free.”

But Rafiqullah’s story is a troubling example of the Taliban’s active efforts to recruit children for use as combatants in terror attacks.

In June, a 6-year-old boy in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province said Taliban militants had forced him to put on a suicide vest and walk up to American soldiers, an attack foiled when he instead asked Afghan soldiers for help.  And in April, a Taliban video surfaced from Pakistan that showed militants instructing a 12-year-old boy as he beheaded a man with a knife.

President Karzai said he considers Rafiqullah “not guilty” of the attempted attack on the provincial governor and wished the boy future success as he resumes a life in Pakistan that his Taliban instructors planned to end.

“The message of the Afghan people is a message of kindness, a message of good relations, good business and trade, not deceiving and encouraging people‘s children to carry out suicide attacks," Karzai said.

State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said July 19 that President Karzai’s decision should be viewed within the context of the “coercive nature” of the Taliban.  Accounts of children being coerced into working for the Taliban, including becoming suicide bombers, are “not unheard of or unusual,” he said.