Taliban Encourage Afghan Kids to Suicide: NDS

Taliban are isolating lazy and low profile students in Pakistani Madrasas, to give them a wrong picture about Afghanistan and work with them psychologically to commit suicide, a spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, Lutfullah Mashal told Reuters recently.

Suicide attacks, unknown in Afghanistan until 2004, have become particularly worrying to the country as newly minted government forces take control of security ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign combat troops in 2014.

"Most Muslim families send their children for Islamic education to Pakistani madrassas and Taliban, especially al Qaeda related Taliban, they chose and select some dumb students, lazy students and students from poor background of family to be recruited as suicide attackers. They isolate them from the rest of the students, they train them and in most cases they hypnotize them. They work with them psychologically and they give them a wrong picture of Afghanistan," Mashal said.

Suicide bombings are the most lethal type of weapons to be used against civilian and military forces after IEDs.

Abdul Wahab, 18, originally from Kunduz in the northern Afghanistan, but who grew up in Pakistan's garrison town of Rawalpindi, said he was approached and encouraged by Taliban to commit suicide.

He stated that he made four unsuccessful attempts to detonate his explosive-laden car on foreign military convoys in northern Afghanistan before he was caught last month.

He was given training in a camp for15 days in a camp for Afghan refugees near the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on how to set off a car bomb.

Afghanistan's National Directorate Security (NDS) says it is trying to draw the poison out of the young minds by teaching them the Koran, taking them to mosques in Kabul to show people praying peacefully and proving their instigators were wrong.

This comes as last week; at least 20 Afghan civilians were killed when a pair of suicide bombers detonated explosives within minutes of each other in a crowded part of the southern city of Kandahar.