In The Days

• Source: Brisbane Times
• News Date: 4/23/07

Is This The Brave New World?
—ITD Editor

“As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.”
—Isa 3:12

The Taliban has distributed a propaganda film showing a 12-year-old boy cutting off the head of a militant accused of being an American spy.

The radical Islamic group, which has previously filmed executions and decapitated bodies being dragged through streets, ordered the death of Ghulam Nabi for supposedly passing on information used by US forces to kill a senior commander in an airstrike.

The Taliban claimed that Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, regarded as one of the top three associates of supreme leader Mullah Omar, was killed in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on Dec 19.

The unidentified boy in the film wears a camouflage jacket and carries a large knife.Before the execution, the boy says in a high-pitched voice: “He is an American spy. Those who do this kind of thing will receive this kind of fate.”

The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows him hacking at the man’s neck, before exclaiming: “God is great!” and hoisting the severed head by the hair.

Iqbal Haider, the secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said the beheading and the use of a child was “outright barbarism”. He added: “Whosoever has committed this, whether they are Afghan, Taliban or al-Qa’eda, they are enemy number one of the Muslims.”

An Associated Press reporter spoke to the victim’s family in Kili Faqiran, a remote village in south-west Pakistan, where Mr Nabi’s father, Ghulam Sakhi, said his son was a loyal Taliban member who had fought in Afghanistan.

He added that his neighbours had told him that the video was being openly sold at the village bazaar.