KANDAHAR (BNO NEWS) — Police in southern Afghanistan have arrested a 10-year-old Pakistani boy who had been instructed to carry out a suicide bombing, the government said on Sunday.
Sediq Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the child was arrested on Friday in the PD 10 area of Kandahar City in Kandahar province before he reached his intended target. He did not say where the boy, who was identified as Abdul Samad, had been instructed to blow himself up.
Samad was kidnapped in May by militants in Quetta, the largest city and the provincial capital of Balochistan Province in Pakistan. “He was taken to one of the terrorist education centers across the border and prepared for a suicide bombing,” Sediqqi said.
In a statement, the ministry condemned the attempted bombing. “[The] Ministry of Interior Affairs strongly condemns this unforgivable, shameful, un-Islamic and inhumane act of the enemies of peace and stability for using the innocent children, Afghan and Islamic culture for suicide bombings,” the statement said.
A spokesperson for the Kandahar provincial government’s Media and Information Center also condemned the attempted attack. “Insurgents are encouraging little boys to carry out suicide attacks and this is an illegal effort and against the Islam as well,” the spokesperson said.
It was not immediately known which insurgent group had instructed the boy to carry out the attack. On May 1, four civilians were killed and 12 others were injured when a 12-year-old suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded market in eastern Afghanistan.
How utterly disgusting. It is extraordinary, indeed, how swiftly Muslims wish to defend their religion from any attack, and yet the suicide bombers, fatwas (like the still-remaining sentence of death on Salman Rushdie’s head), and general savagery all come from Muslims who will tell you that they are the truest of Muslims. The same is true, though in less salient manner, for those Christians who shoot abortion doctors with shotguns, who murder homosexuals, who yearn to stone disbelievers to death. Are the violent perpetrators of these crimes truly un-Islamic and un-Christian? Or are those who deny those crimes the ones who, taking the holy texts at their word, un-Islamic and un-Christian? I am inclined to believe the latter, since their holy books are often quite explicit on what acts of violence to commit against various crimes. Of course, the believers who ignore these passages are more moral, better people, but the fact is that they are ignoring what is in their religious books and thus following a diluted form of their faith. These violent elements are dangerous and would land a normal person in an asylum or jail with ease, and yet they can be defended, to a degree, simply because they appear in a holy book. Is this right? Is this just? Of course not.
But the use of a child this young as a suicide bomber is among the most disgusting instances of either coercion or brainwashing or both I can imagine, What a sick interpretation of an ideology, indeed. These fanatics may well be going beyond the literal texts in their books in some instances, but the fact is that they get to these mad interpretations through those texts. If we are to have progress and civility in this world, we cannot allow fanatics and fundamentalists to act in these ways. It is not simply immoral; it is on the verge of psychosis.