Taliban’s child warriors rebuild their lives
Brainwashed youths in Pakistan trade deadly devices for school textbooks
MALAKAND, PAKISTAN — At first glance, they seem just like any other group of high-spirited teenage schoolboys.
Dressed in the compulsory school uniform of greenand-white striped shirts and cream trousers, they spend their mornings studying hard for their exams and their afternoons on the playing fields.
To observe these boys studiously poring over their textbooks, or running around the sports field during games of football or basketball, it was hard to imagine that only a few months previously they had been living a very different existence.
For the 180 or so boys attending this highly special- ized school on Pakistan’s lawless North-West Frontier are all veterans of the Taliban, the militant Islamist movement that is waging war on both sides of the border with neighbouring Afghanistan.
Seized or bought from their families by Taliban fighters promising them a better life, they were plunged into a relentless cycle of indoctrination aimed at turning them into suicide bombers or fighters willing to sacrifice their lives attacking NATO forces in Afghanistan or taking part in the Taliban’s increasingly violent campaign against the Pakistani government.
In one of the worst examples, a Pakistani boy was caught on a CCTV camera moments before he blew himself up outside a Sufi shrine in La- hore in 2010, killing 45 people and maiming another 175. Overall, it is estimated that more than 4,000 people have been killed by 200 attacks carried out by teenage Taliban suicide bombers.
Gen. Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistan army, ordered that a specialist school be set up to rehabilitate these teenage victims of Taliban indoctrination.
Called the Sabaoon School (Sabaoon in Pashto means the first light of dawn), it is located in the frontier town of Malakand, where, in 1897, the young Winston Churchill took part in his first military campaign with the British army, as well as writing the occasional dispatch for the Daily Telegraph.
Run on the same principles as any normal boarding school, with the children learning the same curriculum taught in other schools in the area, Sabaoon also boasts an impressive team of child psychologists who work closely with the children to help them learn the error of their ways.
“Our main task is to try to reverse the brainwashing they have suffered at the hands of the Taliban,” said Col. Mohammed Islam, who runs the school, which receives funding from UNICEF and the Pakistan government.
Some of the children at the school were bought by the Taliban from their families for about $185. “They come from poor families who have too many children and can’t af- ford to keep them,” explained one of the school’s psychologists. “They sell them to the Taliban thinking they will be looked after, and it is only later that they discover what is going on.”
One of the biggest challenges the school faces is to persuade parents to take their children back once they are deemed fit. “The families don’t want them because of the cost,” he said.
Even so, Col. Islam believes the school is making good progress at helping the children to reject the Taliban’s ideology and make a better life for themselves. To date only three of those released from the school have rejoined the Taliban, which he believes is a major achievement given the scale and effectiveness of the organization’s brainwashing techniques. “We find that once these children have been introduced to proper education they don’t want to stop learning,” said Col. Islam.