School lights path for child warriors
MALAKAND, PAKISTAN At first glance, they seem just like any other group of high- spirited teenage schoolboys.
They spend their mornings studying hard for their exams and their afternoons on the playing fields.
To observe these boys poring over their textbooks, or running around the sports field, it was hard to imagine that only a few months previously they had been living a very different existence.
The 180 or so boys attending this 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 violent campaign against the Pakistani government.
Pakistani security officials estimate that hundreds, if not thousands, of children have been killed in the Taliban’s relentless campaign of terrorism.
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 teenagers.
Called the Sabaoon School (Sabaoon in Pashto means the first light of dawn), it 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. “We are trying to break the myth of misplaced perceptions perpetrated by the terrorists.”
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 afford 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.