At first glance Mohibullah looks an ordinary Afghan teenager, wide-eyed with a tender smile, a little peach fuzz and a boyish dream of becoming a kick boxer. But this 15-year-old is languishing in prison ” jailed after the Taliban preyed on him to become a suicide bomber.
The runaway teen was apprehended in 2014 as he was about to blow himself up outside a district governor’s office. A failed mission that has left him locked up in juvenile detention in southern Kandahar city.
Mohibullah’s eyes welled up as he described how he was indoctrinated about the glories of martyrdom as a shortcut to a paradise, filled with chaste virgins and lakes of milk and honey.
“You will feel no pain when you detonate your suicide vest,” he quoted one of his handlers as saying in an AFP interview inside the prison.
“You will instantly be in heaven’s embrace.”
Mohibullah, whose story offers troubling insight into how Afghanistan’s conflict has metastasised into a hidden war on children, was nervously slouched in a chair in the prison warden’s office, dressed in a green vinyl jacket and embroidered Kandahari hat.
Prison authorities were present during the interview.
Behind him, on a white board, were scrawled in Pashto the crimes of fellow inmates: robbery, adultery, sodomy, planting land mines.
His handlers, he said, made him choose from a list of five high-profile targets. He picked one he considered pregnable: the district chief of Arghandab in Kandahar, a lush region filled with grape and pomegranate groves.
With hugs, garlands and the promise of an eternal afterlife, he said he was taken on a circuitous journey to Arghandab, passing from one handler to the next, spending nights in the back of cars.
Tipped-off officials arrested him before he could reach his target and he was sentenced to four years in a juvenile prison.
Mohibullah’s fingers fidgeted nervously in his lap as he spoke, his shoulders sagging apparently under the weight of his own words.
Mohibullah claimed during the interview that his indoctrination took place at one of the thousands of unregulated madrassas in Pakistan, many funded with Saudi money.
Afghan officials claim they are a prime Taliban recruiting ground. Kabul has fraught relations with Islamabad, which it blames for sponsoring the insurgency, and the Pakistani government recently admitted after years of official denial that the Taliban leadership enjoys safe haven inside the country.
