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Journalism of Courage
A Six-Year-Old Afghan boy, Juma Gul, has claimed that he thwarted an effort by Taliban militants to trick him into being a suicide bomber. Gul’s story, narrated before a meeting of tribal elders and US military officers here, provoked tears and anger.
Though the Taliban dismissed the report as propaganda, at a time when US and NATO forces are under increasing criticism over civilian casualties, both Afghan tribal elders and US military officers said they were convinced by his dramatic account.
Gul, who collects scrap metal for money, said that sometime last month Taliban fighters forced him to wear a vest they said would spray out flowers when he touched a button. He said they told him that when he saw American soldiers, “throw your body at them.” The militants cornered Juma in a Taliban-controlled district in southern Afghanistan’s Ghazni province.
“When they first put the vest on my body I didn’t know what to think, but then I felt the bomb,” said Gul, “After I figured out it was a bomb, I went to the Afghan soldiers for help.”
Abdul Rahim Deciwal, the chief administrator for Gul’s village of Athul, brought the boy to a weekend meeting between Afghan elders and US Army Colonel Martin P Schweitzer. Gul said he was being raised by his sister because his father works in a bakery in Pakistan and his mother lives and does domestic work in another village.
“I think the boy is intelligent,” Deciwal said. “When he came from the enemy he found
a checkpoint of the ANA
(Afghan National Army), and he asked the ANA: ‘Hey, can you help me? Somebody gave me this jacket and I don’t know what’s inside but maybe something bad’.”
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, denied the militant group uses child fighters, saying it has hundreds of adults ready for suicide missions. “We don’t need to use a child,” Ahmadi told AP by satellite phone. “It’s against Islamic law, it’s against humanitarian law. This is just propaganda against the Taliban.”
However, a gory Taliban video that surfaced in April showed militants instructing a boy of about 12 as he beheaded an alleged traitor with a large knife. UN officials condemned the act as a war crime.
