This week, an 8 year old Afghan girl was killed because insurgents asked her to carry a bag to a police vehicle. That bag carried a bomb. They detonated the bomb as she approached the police vehicle. It killed her.
This article demonstrates hesitation of one youth had as he was strapped with bombs and ready to kill Israeli’s. He didn’t. He admitted fear. This moment of clarity saved his life and theirs.
Maybe, these violent extremists are not penetrating the hearts and minds of youths as effectively these days. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of violent extremists?
How the Taliban ends
Jonathan Kay: In March, 2004, Israeli soldiers manning the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus witnessed a shocking sight: An adolescent Palestinian boy named Abdu lifted up his shirt to reveal a large suicide vest. Everyone braced for an explosion. But instead, the boy froze, and declared to the Israelis that he didn’t want to blow himself up.
Abdu (who later turned out to have “developmental problems,” according to his parents) kneeled on the ground and appeared terrified. He removed the vest and then was taken into Israeli custody. The entire pathetic spectacle was captured on video. His picture appeared on the front page of the next day’s Israeli newspapers, with headlines such as “I wanted virgins in paradise.”
In the long campaign to defeat and discredit Palestinian terrorism, this was a decisive moment. The fact that the terrorists would use a mentally disabled boy as their bomber showed that they’d become desperate for recruits. Worse, from their own propaganda perspective, it showed that they would resort to any tactic -even killing a Palestinian child -to further their campaign.
I thought of Abdu this week when I saw news that an eightyear-old Afghan girl had been tricked into blowing herself up near a police station in Uruzgan Province. (She died, but no one else was hurt.) The case is not isolated: In Pakistan, terrorists recently strapped a suicide vest to a nine-year-old girl they’d abducted and drugged (the girl was saved and returned to her family). Neither plot is likely to have originated with the Taliban itself, which tries to avoid using children. But both incidents will help discredit the instrument of terrorism upon which the Taliban rely. (Photo: Finbar O’Reilly)
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