US: Tapes show boys trained to kill
BAGHDAD (AP) - February 6, 2008 Footage aired for reporters showed an apparent training
operation with black-masked boys - some of whom appeared to be
about 10 years old - storming a house and holding guns to the heads
of mock residents. Another tape showed a young boy wearing a
suicide vest and posing with automatic weapons.
But U.S. and Iraqi officials said they could offer no estimate
on how many children have fallen under the terror group's control.
They named just a handful of attacks blamed on women or children.
The American military said some of the tapes were found in
December during a U.S. raid in Khan Bani Saad, northeast of
Baghdad, and said it indicated a pattern that al-Qaida in Iraq was
increasingly using children for sinister means.
"Al-Qaida in Iraq wants to poison the next generation of
Iraqis," Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman, told
reporters Wednesday inside the heavily guarded Green Zone. "It is
offering children as the new generation of mujahedeen," he said,
using the Arabic term for holy warriors.
"We believe this video is used as propaganda to send out to
recruit other boys ... and to send a broader message across Iraq to
indoctrinate youth into al-Qaida," he said.
Other scenes from the Khan Bani Saad video showed masked boys
forcing a man off his bicycle at gunpoint and stopping a car and
kidnapping its driver along a dusty country road. At one point the
boys - wearing soccer jerseys with ammunition slung across their
chests - sit in a circle on the floor, chanting slogans in support
of al-Qaida.
Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari told
reporters that militants are kidnapping more and more Iraqi
children, though he could not offer details or numbers.
"This is not only to recruit them, but also to demand ransom to
fund the operations of al-Qaida," al-Askari said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said Wednesday that its troops,
along with Iraqi forces, killed seven suspected insurgents and
detained 45 others in five days of raids across Iraq.
Also Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded near a police convoy
transporting suspected Shiite militia fighters south of Baghdad,
killing four passers-by and wounding nine other people, police
said. At least 19 people were killed or found dead Wednesday across
the country.
The roadside bombing was an apparent attempt to free the 10
detainees who were linked to the Mahdi Army militia that is
nominally loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according
to police Brig. Gen. Ghassan Mohammed Ali.
He said the detainees had been captured over the past month and
had been accused of attacking civilians and U.S. and Iraqi security
forces in the city.
The bomb went off in Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, where
there have been fierce clashes between rival Shiite militia
factions engaged in a violent power struggle in the oil-rich area.
Two women and two men in a car near the explosion were killed,
and nine other people - two policemen, three prisoners and four
civilians - were wounded, Ali said.
Al-Sadr has ordered his militia to stand in a six-month
cease-fire that expires at the end of February, but the U.S.
military says disaffected fighters have broken with the movement
and persisted with attacks.
Iraqi security forces in the area also are often accused of
being infiltrated by militia fighters, particularly from the Badr
Brigade, the militant arm of the largest Shiite party, the Supreme
Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC.
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Associated Press Writer Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this
report.