Taliban training smuggled Pakistani kids in Afghan madrasa

KABUL: It was a routine check. Two vans, both without licence plates, were stopped earlier this month by police in Afghanistan’s eastern Ghazni province, where Taliban hold sway in large swaths of the countryside.

Inside, police found 27 boys between the ages of four and 15, all being taken illegally to Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province to study in seminaries called madrasa, according to a police report acquired by reporters.

The authorities said that the children were being taken to Pakistani madrasa to educate a new generation in the ways of the Taliban, with the intention of returning them to Afghanistan to enforce the same rigid interpretation of Islam practised by the radical religious movement until its ouster by US-led coalition forces in 2001.

The police called it child trafficking and threw the drivers and the only other adults, two men who organised the convoy, into jail.

But the parents said they wanted their children to study in Pakistan and had willingly sent them to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s sparsely populated Baluchistan province on the border with Afghanistan.

An Afghan counter-terrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because revealing his identity could endanger him, said Afghan intelligence has identified 26 madrasa in Pakistan where it suspects future generations of Taliban are being trained. Several of the 26 madrasa he identified were in Quetta.

Sheikh Abdul Hakim madrasa was among the Quetta schools the Afghan official identified as a Taliban recruitment centre.

A reporter went to the madrasa and was told the director, after whom the madrasa is named, was on a missionary sabbatical to preach Islam, but a teacher, Azizullah Mainkhail, said some students at the madrasa were from Afghanistan.

The majority, however, he said are Pakistanis from villages throughout Baluchistan. He denied affiliation with the Taliban or Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency known by the acronym ISI and accused by Afghanistan of supporting the Taliban.

A separate attempt in Ghazni province to move children across the border, also for religious education, was foiled by police about two weeks ago, the Afghan official said.

The 13 children, from neighbouring Paktika province, were also destined for religious studies, this time in seminaries in Pakistan’s sprawling Arabian Sea port city of Karachi. — AP