Jihadist Video Shows Boy Beheading Man
Pastor Dale Morgan
Jihadist Video Shows Boy Beheading Man*
By ABDUL SATTAR
The Associated Press
Friday, April 20, 2007; 2:24 PM
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-Qaida and Taliban militants find sanctuary.
But such al-Qaida-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-Qaida 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."