His brown eyes wide with innocence, Abdullah laughs like any other 11-year-old as he tells his story. But it is no ordinary schoolboy tale he is sharing. It is of his arrest. Charged with carrying explosives, he is suspected of being a potential suicide bomber and is Afghanistan’s youngest prisoner. He is now behind bars in one the country’s most secure jails. These are the facts of his case but nothing quite prepares you for the reality that is Abdullah. When I saw him in the prison office which is now his cell, my jaw dropped. I’d been told I would meet a youth who’d been arrested with a group of Taliban fighters – but I didn’t expect the picture of apparent innocence that confronted me.
He had just washed and he was crouching on the floor, having trouble closing the bag he’d crammed his toiletries into. He could scarcely pull the zip. Yet Abdullah could strip, load and fire a Kalashnikov rifle. He would not tell me his full name. “Abdullah”, he said sharply. His voice hadn’t yet broken. He is an orphan. But at the religious school where he was taught, Abdullah learned the principles of jihad – holy war.
After a day reading the Koran, the evenings were taken up learning about the Kalashnikov and the pistol, about the foreigners that were coming to Muslim lands, killing women and children. Children like Abdullah and his younger brother Amin, who is 10. AbdullahÂ’s weapon of choice was the Kalashnikov because he found the trigger of the pistol hard to pull.
I asked Abdullah how he came to be caught with explosives. He launched into a story of how his cousin had come to his school near Peshawar in Pakistan and told him they were going on an outing. He walked with a group of men over the mountains and into Afghanistan. He was given an oversized jacket to put on – the jacket that most of the explosives were found inside.
I watched this little boy speak, his high-pitched voice so innocent, pouring out the detail of an adventure he had clearly relished. He was arrested and taken to the jail of Kabul’s Intelligence Service. I asked: “How would you feel about being a suicide bomber?”
He said he knew he’d be in pieces. But he also knew the difference between suicide, which God forbade, and sacrifice, which is what you become if you blow yourself up, killing the non-Muslims who want to kill your family. Afterwards you would go straight to heaven, with 70 girls. I suspect he didn’t care too much about the girls. But when I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, he said: “When I’m older I’ll kill non-Muslims. If I don’t, they’ll come to our homes and kill us.”
ItÂ’s not clear what will happen to Abdullah. But the officials are likely to simply send him back across the border to his religious school. He will have quite a tale to tell the other children as he strips and loads his Kalashnikov, ready to defend Islam.