Gebruiker:JanDeFietser/kladblok1

Beheadings have emerged as another tactic especially in Iraq since April 2003. Foreign civilians have borne the brunt of the beheadings, although U.S. and Iraqi military personnel have also been targeted. After kidnapping the victim, the kidnappers typically make some sort of demand of the government of the hostage's nation and give a time limit for the demand to be carried out, often 72 hours. Beheading is often threatened if the government fails to heed the wishes of the hostage takers. Frequently the crude beheadings are videotaped and made available on the Internet.

Ghulam Nabi (Pakistan)

A video obtained by the Associated Press on April 20, 2007 shows a young boy, appearing to be around 12 years of age, beheading a man identified as Ghulam Nabi, a Pakistani militant accused of betraying the Taliban. According to the AP report, "A continuous 2 1/2-minute shot then shows the victim lying on his side on a patch of rubble-strewn ground. A man holds Nabi by his beard while the boy, wearing a camouflage military jacket and oversized white sneakers, cuts into the throat. Other men and boys call out "Allahu akbar!" — "God is great!" — as blood spurts from the wound. The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows the boy hacking and slashing at the man's neck until the head is severed."

KILI FAQIRAN, Pakistan — The boy with the knife looks barely 12. In a high-pitched voice, he denounces the bound, blindfolded man before him as an American spy. Then he hacks off the captive’s head to cries of “God is great!” and hoists it in triumph by the hair.

A video circulating in Pakistan records the grisly death of Ghulam Nabi, a Pakistani militant accused of betraying a top Taliban official who was killed in a December airstrike in Afghanistan.

An Associated Press reporter confirmed Nabi’s identity by visiting his family in Kili Faqiran, their remote village in southwestern Pakistan.

The video, which was obtained by AP Television News in the border city of Peshawar on Tuesday, appears authentic and is unprecedented in jihadist propaganda because of the youth of the executioner.

Captions mention Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban’s current top commander in southern Afghanistan, although he does not appear in the video. The soundtrack features songs praising Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar and “Sheikh Osama” — an apparent reference to Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The footage shows Nabi making what is described as a confession, being blindfolded with a checkered scarf.

“He is an American spy. Those who do this kind of thing will get this kind of fate,” says his baby-faced executioner, who is not identified.

A continuous 2 1/2-minute shot then shows the victim lying on his side on a patch of rubble-strewn ground. A man holds Nabi by his beard while the boy, wearing a camouflage military jacket and oversized white sneakers, cuts into the throat. Other men and boys call out “Allahu akbar!” — “God is great!” — as blood spurts from the wound.

The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows the boy hacking and slashing at the man’s neck until the head is severed.

A Pashto-language voiceover in the video identifies Nabi and his home village of Kili Faqiran in Baluchistan province, which lies about two hours’ drive from the Afghan border.

A reporter went to the village, and Nabi’s distraught and angry father, Ghulam Sakhi, confirmed his son’s identity from a still picture that AP made from the footage. He said neighbors had told him the video is available at the village bazaar, but he had no wish to see it.

Sakhi said his son had been a loyal Taliban member who fought in Afghanistan and sheltered the hard-line Afghan group’s leaders in the family’s mud-walled compound.

He blames the Taliban and wants to avenge his son’s death.

“The Taliban are not mujahedeen. They are not fighting for the cause of Islam,” the 70-year-old said. “If I got my hands on them I would kill them and even tear their flesh with my own teeth.”

Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, told AP he had no information about Nabi or the video. None of the group’s commanders he contacted could confirm the execution, he said.

The method of Nabi’s death was not unusual for Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions. Suspected informers are regularly found beheaded and dumped along the side of the road in the lawless, mountainous regions along the Afghan-Pakistani border where Al Qaeda and Taliban militants find sanctuary.

But such Al Qaeda-style killings are rarely featured in the Taliban’s increasingly frequent propaganda videos. The use of a child to conduct the beheading stands out even among those filmed by militants in Iraq.

“This is outright barbarism,” Iqbal Haider, secretary-general of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said after viewing the video. “Whosoever has committed this, whether they are Taliban or anybody else or any Afghan or Al Qaeda or anybody, they are enemy No. 1 of the Muslims.”

The video accuses Nabi of responsibility for a U.S. airstrike that killed Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, who was regarded as one of the top three associates of Omar, the Taliban supreme leader. He was hit while traveling by car in Afghanistan’s Helmand province Dec. 19.

Osmani was the highest-ranking Taliban leader to die since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that ousted the hard-line regime in late 2001 for refusing to hand over bin Laden following the Sept. 11 terror attack on the United States.

The U.S. military said at the time that Osmani’s death was a serious blow to militant operations, and NATO commanders said this week that a feared spring offensive had yet to materialize.

Sakhi, a retired mosque preacher with a long gray beard, spoke unashamedly of his son’s Taliban affiliation and wept twice during an interview in his simple home at the foot of a mountain valley in Baluchistan province.

He said Nabi fought against the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance that helped U.S. forces to victory in Afghanistan.

After returning to Pakistan, Nabi ran a religious school in the Baluchistan capital of Quetta and had regularly sheltered both Osmani and Dadullah at the family compound, the father said.

He said Nabi also bought weapons for Taliban fighters and organized medical treatment for those injured during fighting in Afghanistan.

Some days after Osmani’s death, Nabi went to Peshawar and then to Wana, a tribal town considered a militant stronghold, to collect money from Taliban officials to buy guns and food for militants in Afghanistan, Sakhi said.

He said his son called at the end of January to reveal that a tribal council had sentenced him to death on charges of tipping off U.S. forces about Osmani’s movements, despite his denials.

His son passed the phone to Dadullah, but the militant leader ignored his pleas for clemency, Sakhi said.

“I talked to him and said you visited us and my son was a close friend so why are you going to hang him? He just said, ‘How are you?’, and switched off the phone,” Sakhi said.

“They are the enemies of Islam,” he said of the Taliban. “They are behaving like savages.”

Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for Human Rights Watch, said the use of a child to commit such an act constituted a war crime and was a “new low” in the conflict in Afghanistan.

He noted the Taliban had teenage combatants but they were not recruited on a large scale because of the availability of adult fighters. He said he had seen children in the background of some jihadist videos but none in which they were directly involved in violence.

“I don’t know why they would do this,” Zarifi said. “The Taliban have to some extent tried to play to the public in Afghanistan and have not engaged in the complete sowing of mayhem that we have seen in Iraq. But this kind of act is really egregious. It’s off the charts.” Explore posts in the same categories: Afghanistan, Taliban, Terrorists, pakistan

//\\Washington – Human rights organizations, religious leaders and government officials alike expressed outrage after a video that depicts a child beheading a man was circulated in Pakistan, and responsibility for the act claimed by the Taliban. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey told reporters April 26 it was “absolutely appalling” and “beyond any standard, I think, of civilized behavior anywhere in the world.”

State Department public affairs officer Gregg Sullivan strongly denounced the Afghan insurgents. “Exploiting children and making them instruments of hate and death is a barbaric and abhorrent tactic,” he told USINFO. He condemned the “horrific and brutal terrorist acts shown in the video footage,” adding “We find it unconscionable.”

Taliban spokesman Shuhab Athul told the Associated Press that the Taliban detained, tried and executed the man, Ghulam Nabi, because he was an informer. The boy who beheaded Ghulam Nabi with a knife in the execution video appears to be about 12 years old. In the video, he calls the man a spy before cutting off his head amid shouts of “God is great.” The boy displays the severed head, holding it by the hair.

“Even as a stand-alone incident it’s alarming because it does indicate radicalization which is unprecedented,” Human Rights Watch Asia research director Sam Zia Zarifi told USINFO. It is not Pashtun tribal custom, “where we can say there is a religious, historic or ethnic explanation for it. This is just unacceptable by any standards,” he said. Human Rights Watch is a nongovernmental organization that promotes human rights worldwide.

Zarifi said the tape is worrisome because “the activity in it is so egregious, even by their standards,” a sign that ultraextremist elements inside the Taliban have a say and are playing to an audience.

UNICEF sharply condemned the Taliban. UNICEF spokesman Patrick McCormick told USINFO, “It was an abominable and cowardly act on their behalf to use a minor, whose life now is probably permanently disfigured or destroyed by that act.”

“It’s very wrong for the Taliban to use a small boy to behead a man,” cleric Mullah Attullah told Reuters in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan. “I appeal to the Taliban to please stop this because non-Muslims will think Islam is a cruel and terrorist religion. The Taliban do not follow the laws of Islam,” he said.

The incident surfaced as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch separately issued reports on increased Taliban abuses of Afghan civilians. Human Rights Watch says that insurgency-related civilian deaths in Afghanistan have “increased dramatically” since the beginning of 2006.

The Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports document war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami militias, crimes which appear to be escalating. “The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians. Even when they’re aiming at military targets, insurgent attacks are often so indiscriminate that Afghan civilians end up as the main victims,” Human Rights Watch terrorism and counterterrorism director Joanne Mariner said at the release of its report in Kabul, Afghanistan April 16. Humanitarian aid workers, journalists, doctors, clerics, teachers, politicians and government employees are insurgent targets of choice, she said.

Afghan journalist and translator Ajmal Naqsbandi, abducted by the Taliban in March, was beheaded along with his driver Sayed Agha in early April. Mariner said their murders “were war crimes.”

Attacks of Taliban militia on schools, particularly girl’s schools, have doubled since 2005, according to Human Rights Watch. During the period of Taliban rule, women became virtual prisoners, as the Taliban denied them access to jobs and education, claiming it was un-Islamic. In September 2006, Taliban gunmen assassinated a long-time crusader for girls' education and provincial director for women’s affairs, Safia Ama Jan. (See related article.)

Although the Taliban formerly banned opium poppy cultivation, there is mounting evidence that some insurgents have become involved in the trade. At a March meeting of the U.N. Security Council, Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Antonio Maria Costa, reporting on the latest opium crop survey in Afghanistan, said, “The vicious circle of drugs funding terrorism and terrorism supporting drug lords is stronger than ever.”