Suicide Bombers

A senior Afghan intelligence official estimated that more than 100 had been intercepted in the past 12 months, including 20 from the Kandahar area in the south. The insurgents seek to exploit the innocence of their recruits and turn it into a weapon.

The largely illiterate boys are fed a diet of anti-Western and anti-Afghan government propaganda until they are prepared to kill, he said. But the boys are also assured that they will miraculously survive the devastation they cause.

“The worst part is that these children don’t think that they are killing themselves,” said the official. “They are often given an amulet containing Koranic verses. Mullahs tell them, ‘When this explodes you will survive and God will help you survive the fire. Only the infidels will be killed, you will be saved and your parents will go to paradise’.”

Throughout the war against the Soviet invaders in the 1980s, and the civil strife that followed, Afghan fighters of all factions rejected suicide attacks as cowardly and unIslamic.

The tactic was adopted only after 2001, learned from Arab jihadists who had used it to devastating effect in Iraq.

The first Afghan suicide bomber is believed to have been a man called Hafez Abdallah, who in 2004 threw himself on a military Jeep and detonated mortar bombs strapped to his body. Suicide bombs hidden in vehicles or sewn into vests have since been widely employed.

The Taliban denies using children as bombers, pointing out that its battlefield code forbids any military use of young boys. One Taliban facilitator from northern Afghanistan told The Daily Telegraph: “All our bombers are men and they are all volunteers. We never use boys.”

But Nato and Afghan security officials said the tactic has been widely adopted. Child bombers had been used by the Haqqani network, an insurgent group aligned to the Taliban.

Boys are frequently chosen from the madrassas, or Islamic colleges, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where poor Pashtun families in southern Afghanistan send their sons for a free education.

“They send them because they can’t feed them sometimes. They have 10 sons, they can’t feed them,” said the Afghan official.

Gul Khan, who looks no older than 10, said his father had insisted he go to a madrassa in Pakistan run by a man called Maulawi Sher Jan.

“Each day they were preaching that we would tie bombs on to our bodies and attack foreigners in Afghanistan,” he said after escaping and being arrested on the border.

“They told us the bombs would not kill us, only the Americans would die and you can come back to us.”

Many of the captured boys have been pardoned, but others remain in Afghanistan’s child jails. Once in custody, they often retract their televised confessions, justice officials in Kandahar said.

Three convicted child suicide bombers, seen by The Daily Telegraph, all said their confessions had been false and they were wrongly convicted. Haji Abdul Haq, the juvenile prosecutor for Kandahar, denied pressure had been placed on them and said they were often caught wearing bomb vests. “They confess at first, but when their families reach them, they change their minds,” he said.

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