ISLAMABAD: Four boys from Swat in Pakistan's restive northwest who were kidnapped by militants to be trained as suicide bombers have narrated harrowing tales of their ordeal in captivity, saying they were told to target their families if prevented from joining the jihad against security forces.
They said militants had taken them by force from their villages to training camps in different parts of the Matta sub-district where a large number of other boys were being trained as suicide bombers, Dawn reported on Friday in a dispatch from Swat's largest city of Mingora.
On Thursday, security forces presented them before a team of reporters in Mingora. Two of them, who were in a camp named Fazal Banda, said at least 250 boys, most of them in their teens, were being trained for terrorist acts and suicide bombings.
One of them said he was working in the field when armed men forced him into a car. "They blindfolded me and told me that I would get training for suicide bombing."
"The gunmen took me to the Fazal Banda camp where militants were training a large number of boys. They told us that security personnel were infidels and we should wage jihad against them. If our own families stopped us from joining jihad, we should target them as well."
Another boy said he was in his village when a group men sought his help to load luggage onto a vehicle. "When I went to help them, some masked men bundled me into the vehicle and drove away. They put a mask on my face and removed it at a training camp inChuparyal."
He said some 150 boys were being trained at the camp. Some of them had voluntarily joined the militants while some had been kidnapped, he added.
One of the boys said the Taliban had kidnapped him and told him he would be trained for the jihad. "They trained us and gave us little food. Three to four boys would get one chapati and some green tea. They warned us that anyone trying to escape would be slaughtered," he said.
The boys said they escaped from the training camps after four days and managed to return home.
"On our fourth morning at the camp, we got up along with other Taliban for prayers. We went out of the barracks for ablution and ran away," said two boys.
The Pakistani security forces had April 26 launched a major offensive against the Taliban in the Malakand division of the North West Frontier Province after they reneged on a controversial peace deal with the provincial government.
Under the deal, the militants were to lay down their arms in return for the imposition of Sharia laws in Swat and six other districts of the Malakand division. Instead, they moved south from their Swat headquarters and occupied Buner district that is just 100 km from Islamabad.
The operations had begun in Lower Dir, the home district of radical cleric Sufi Mohammad, who had brokered the peace deal and who is the father-in-law of Swat Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah. The operations, which have now all but concluded, later spread to Buner and Swat.
Some three million civilians were displaced by the fighting. Large numbers of them have now begun to return home.
The military says over 1,500 Taliban were killed in the fighting.
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