KAPISA PROVINCE - Wednesday's killing of
the mayor of Afghanistan's southern city of
Kandahar, Ghulam Haydar Hamidi, has once again
thrown the spotlight on suicide bombings and the
people who carry them out. The attack took place
at Hamidi's office compound.
A spokesman
for the provincial governor told Radio Free
Europe/Liberty that the bomber entered the
courtyard of the Kandahar city hall by pretending
he was with a group of tribal elders who were
there to discuss a land dispute with the mayor.
The assailant reportedly had explosives hidden in
his turban and detonated them after requesting a
meeting with the mayor. The Taliban claimed
responsibility for the killing.
Even
before the latest attack, Afghan families with children
studying at Islamic schools or
madrassas across the border in Pakistan are
starting to bring them home for fear that they
will be recruited as suicide bombers.
Public awareness of the issue has grown
since Afghan television stations showed children
describing how their teachers in Pakistan groomed
them to put on vests packed with explosives and
detonate them once they approached vehicles
belonging to international or Afghan troops. But
their testimonies suggest they were told that they
themselves would escape unharmed from such
attacks.
In Kapisa province northeast of
the capital Kabul, the families of 17 boys have
either recalled them from Pakistani
madrassas or are refusing to let them go
back there.
One father described how he
sent his 18-year-old son to Pakistan a year ago,
but observed great changes in him when he returned
for a break.
"My son is vehemently opposed
to the government. He says suicide attacks are
considered a superior form of martyrdom and
courage in Islam, and that Muslims must wage a
jihad against the Jews and their friends," he
said.
His son told him that on Fridays,
the madrassa students were shown footage of
Americans and Britons being beheaded. The father
concluded, "I'm not going to allow my son to go
back to study in Pakistan again, because I know I
will lose him."
Although now associated
with the Taliban - whose name reflects their
origin as Islamic students - madrassas in
Pakistan, and before that British India, have long
attracted Afghans in search of a religious
education.
When Soviet troops invaded
Afghanistan in 1979 and the West responded by
backing the mujahideen, madrassas along the
Pakistani side of the border played a major role
in galvanizing Islamic feeling. This was to
backfire when the same madrassas generated
the Taliban movement in the 1990s and, after 2001,
preached jihad against the Afghan government and
its Western allies.
Many Afghan families
now fear their children will be caught up in an
insurgent strategy of recruiting young people for
suicide attacks, as they are both more malleable
and less easy to spot than adults.
A
17-year-old in Laghman province, east of Kapisa,
who was home on vacation from a madrassa in
Peshawar, described the teaching there.
"We were always being told that the Jews
and Christians had attacked Muslim countries. They
destroy the dignity and faith of Muslims. We were
shown footage of the Americans searching people's
homes and killing them ... or killing civilians in
bombardments. They showed us Israeli massacres in
Palestine," he said. "Young people, even children,
were therefore prepared to wage jihad against the
United States."
The young man said he was
keen to return to Peshawar, but his parents had
forbidden him to do so and he would have to obey
them.
A member of the Taliban shadow
administration that is now present in Kapisa, as
in many other provinces, justified the recruitment
of young people and denied that they were
brainwashed.
"Those who say these people
are being deceived are puppets of the US. During
their studies in Pakistani madrassas,
people learn the path of virtue and jihad," the
Taliban official said.
"They come to
understand the reality that human beings are
guests in this world for just a few days, and that
they must do something for their religion and the
next life. They learn the Islamic precepts in
which jihad has high status, and thus they arrive
at practical action - they fight for the interests
of Islam, they satisfy their God, and they bring
illumination to the next life."
Alarmed
about Pakistani schools it believes are turning
out young suicide bombers, the Afghan government
has responded by building madrassas at
home.
A spokesman for Afghanistan's
Education Ministry, Abdul Sabur Ghofrani, said
Islamic schooling was being taken very seriously
and the department concerned had been upgrade to
being a deputy minister's office. "We have 650
madrassas and other religious schools
across the country, and this number will rise to
1,000 in the next three years," he said.
The deputy head of education for Kapisa
province, Abdul Rasul Safi, said there were now 14
religious schools there, one for each
administrative district and the rest in the main
town, Mahmud-i Raqi. Altogether, they catered for
over 800 students, he said.
In one
district, Tagab, police chief Pacha Gol Bakhtiar
said, "The people have promised not to send their
children to Pakistan, and we have promised to
establish madrassas for them here and train them
under the supervision of Afghan scholars."
Choosing the right clerics as teachers
will be a task in itself. One Islamic scholar in
Kabul, who did not want his name to be used,
justified the use of suicide attacks against
"infidel countries".
Accusing US and
Israeli forces of a list of abuses against the
Palestinians and in Lebanon and Iraq, the cleric
asked, "Does it make sense to sit quietly in the
face of such a pharaoh? As long as the cruelty of
the Americans and their friends continues, suicide
attacks and other dangerous tactics are both legal
and legitimate."
The new madrassas
come too late for Taj Mohammad, who lives in
Sarobi district south of Kabul but told his story
to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting while
on a visit to Kapisa.
He described how his
wife sent him off to Pakistan to get their
14-year-old son back immediately she heard news
reports that children were being trained up as
suicide bombers.
"When I got to Pakistan,
I stayed in the madrassa for two or three
nights. My son's classmates told me that he'd gone
off to another madrassa for some kind of
competition and that he'd be back. They used
various excuses to deceive me," Taj Mohammad said,
tears rolling down his face.
"On the third
day, the head of the madrassa told me that
my son had been martyred in the jihad, and that I
had God's blessing. After hearing this news, I was
lost to the world; I passed out."
Returning home, Taj Mohammad avoided
telling his wife for a few days, but finally had
to come out with the truth. "Since that day, my
wife has been stricken and cannot move from her
bed," he said.
Arash Kabuli is a
freelance reporter in Kapisa province.
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