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BAGHDAD: Al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq are training young children as
gunmen and kidnappers, the US and Iraqi militaries alleged on
Wednesday, releasing a video of masked and armed youngsters.
Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US military
spokesman, said five videos showing children being trained by adult
militants were seized in a December 4 raid on a suspected al-Qaeda
base in Khan Bani Saad, north of Baghdad.
“The operation was targeting two senior al-Qaeda
individuals. During the operation two were detained and three were
killed,” he said. AFP has no independent means to confirm the
authenticity of the footage.
The videos released to reporters showed boys
apparently as young as nine wearing balaclava masks and European
football jerseys and brandishing pistols, machineguns and rocket
launchers during a series of training exercises.
One scene shows the gang halting a civilian
volunteer on a bicycle and submitting him to a mock kidnapping,
holding a pistol to the base of his skull and pinning his hands
behind his head.
The boys also practice halting a car and
snatching its occupants, while in another scene, they run through an
armed assault on a village house and storm out of a minibus
brandishing weapons.
Smith said it did not appear that the apparent
child militants had been kidnapped or press-ganged. He said
investigations were continuing and none of the boys had been
detained.
“As we watched the videos and watched the
reaction with adults in the neighborhood, it appears that it is a
tribal series of families in which the adults are involved in
training and it is their children,” he said.
“It’s just an assessment, we don’t have
custody of those children.”
In recent weeks, US and Iraqi spokesmen have
raised new concerns over al-Qaeda’s alleged use of children and
the mentally impaired in suicide bombings, which Smith called a
“disturbing trend.”
The second video, of much lower quality, showed
the rescue by Iraqi forces of a 10-year-old boy kidnapped in the
northern city of Kirkuk by militants who demanded a ransom of $1,000
(680 euros) from his parents.
The footage showed the weeping child reunited
with his delighted parents.
Iraqi defense ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari
told the news conference that the videos were a “sign of
desperation by al-Qaeda” and claimed that children were trained to
kidnap in order to raise funds from ransoms.
-- AFP
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