Islamabad - Taliban militants are using children as
fighters and suicide bombers, Pakistan's new spy chief told lawmakers
in a rare briefing on threats posed by Islamic militants the
country's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), media reports and
officials said Thursday.
Militants are brainwashing innocent children to use them for
killing people, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who was
appointed director general of the military's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) last week, told the closed-door joint session of
the parliament's upper and lower houses the previous day.
Horrifying videos and slides shown during the presentation bore
images of children, aged 10 to 14, carrying various sorts of lethal
weapons, the Urdu-language Jang newspaper reported.
A female lawmaker fainted when a 10-year-old child was shown
cutting a person's throat with a knife.
Young men were used in a majority of the suicide attacks
carried out in the last couple of years across the country, Pasha
told parliament.
The briefing, which continued on Thursday, was called by
President Asif Ali Zardari to build national consensus on the
country's fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who recently
intensified suicide bombings against security troops, public places
and the nation's political leaders.
The ISI chief told the joint house meeting that Pakistan's
military had made enormous sacrifices since it joined the
international fight against terrorism following al-Qaeda's attacks on
Untied States in 2001.
'The lawmakers were informed that 1,368 soldiers were martyred
(killed) and 3,348 wounded,' military sources told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur dpa.
Meanwhile, 581 fighters of Arab and Central Asian origin,
believed to be linked with the al-Qaeda network, were eliminated, 311
injured and 330 arrested in actions across the country, said the
official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani security forces carried out several offensives in
tribal areas and some districts of NWFP, and killed 2,224 local
Taliban militants, injured 1,089 and arrested 2,414 over the last
seven years.
The civilian casualties in dozens of suicide or other attacks
by militants as well as air air artillery strikes by Pakistani forces
were not included in the data.
The closed-chambers briefing is only the third of its kind
since 1974 and comes when the nation stands divided on cooperation in
the US-led fight against terrorism.
Recent US airstrikes on suspected hideouts of al-Qaeda and
Taliban militants have fuelled anger in Pakistan, increasing calls
for ending the alliance. Islamists and conservatives are pressing for
talks with militants rather than using force against them.
Opposition lawmakers were not completely satisfied with
Wednesday's briefing.
Khurram Dastagir Khan, a lawmaker from former prime minister
Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), said the
briefing was 'rather superficial as it only gave us a resume of
events, but no diagnosis.'
Another PML-N legislator, Ayaz Amir, said questions would be
raised during Thursday's briefing 'as to how Pakistan was thrown in
this war and which country had brought this fire to our doorsteps.'
'We need to change this policy to come out of the quagmire in
which we have been stuck up to now,' he was cited as saying by the
English-language Dawn newspaper.
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