For CentralAsiaOnline.com 2011-04-11

Children, some as young as 10, attend a Taliban-run suicide bomber training centre in Spinaki, South Waziristan. The Pakistani Army recovered this video showing a masked instructor and armed guards when it liberated the area in 2008. [YouTube frame grab]

First in a series

On April 3, two suicide bombers struck the Sakhi Sarwar Shrine in Dera Ghazi Khan, killing 50 worshippers and wounding more than 100 others.

The bombers who died – and two would-be bombers arrested at the shrine – were all teenagers. In 2010 suicide bombings in Pakistan reached a deadly peak. Just 49 bombings claimed 1,167 lives, according to official statistics. This represents a startling increase over 2009, when 76 suicide bombings killed 949.

Perhaps even more troubling than the numbers of victims is that many of the suicide bombings are committed by teenagers – usually boys – abducted and brainwashed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Taliban sources have claimed to have anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand teenagers trained as suicide bombers, while government sources say as many as 5,000 teenagers have undergone training by militants.

Pakistan’s children don't sow terror just at home. About 10% of the local suicide bombers are used locally while the rest are sent across the border to Afghanistan, one official of the Forensic Science Section of the Peshawar Police Department said.

Today, Central Asia Online begins a six-part series examining how the Taliban transforms teenagers into walking bombs ready to end their own lives.

Recruitment

The process begins with recruitment, which usually means kidnapping and brainwashing. Teenagers in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are kidnapped by the TTP while on their way to school or work, or plucked from a madrassa where they have been studying, and sent to one of a number of training centres in areas under Taliban control.