 DERA ISMAIL KHAN: Pro-Taliban militants have released a video of an apparently teenage boy beheading one of 16 Pakistani soldiers kidnapped in a restive tribal area bordering Afghanistan. The gruesome recording, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, will likely put further pressure on President Musharraf to crack down on Islamist violence in the NWFP.
| But only brief pressure. The Rantburg Rule of Evanescent Attention Span says that a month from now the only people who'll remember the incident are the murderer, the guy whose head was chopped off, and his Mom. And maybe not the murderer. |
The 35-minute video entitled “Revenge” first shows the 16 soldiers, all of them in uniform, who were taken hostage on August 9 in South Waziristan. Four teenage boys with Kalashnikov assault rifles, daggers and headbands with jihadi slogans are then shown along with one of the soldiers kneeling in front of them. One boy cuts off the soldier’s head using a knife and holds it up for the camera.
| Brutal little beast. Let him get caught red-handed in Afghanistan, of course, and end up in Gitmo, and the usual suspects will be out in force, deploring applying any kind of punishment to a lad of such tender years. |
The soldier’s body was recovered on August 14 from a nearby town. The video shows the victim saying that “security forces should not fight against the Taliban”.
| I'm still not too sure about the logic that sez one side shouldn't kill fellow Moose limbs, while the other side gets to chop the heads of their fellow Moose limbs. It's too subtle for my mere 3-digit IQ to handle. |
“It proves that they are terrorists. It is an act contrary to tribal customs and is also a cowardly act to kill an unarmed human being,” ISPR Spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said. |