Taliban did not spare even infants: report

WASHINGTON, NOV. 24. Even infants were victims of torture and atrocities perpetrated by Afghanistan's Taliban militia in the garb of religion during its five-year rule, a U.S. official website said.

Among the accounts of mutilations, beatings and arbitrary executions by the militia, there was evidence of new abomination - torture of children, the website of the U.S. state department's office of International Information Programs said quoting British and American media reports.

An unknown number of infants were savagely beaten during the Islamic militia's 14-month occupation of Taloqan, the former headquarters of the Northern Alliance, usually for the supposed crimes of their parents, it said.

``The barbarity of the Taliban plumbed new depths when troops shot dead eight boys'' in Kunduz recently ``for daring to laugh. The lads had been chuckling at the soldiers who raised their Kalashnikov rifles''.

It said ``the Taliban is jailing children as young as 10 in Kabul to root out dissent. According to French journalist, Mr. Michel Peyrard, who was held by the Taliban for 25 days, the biggest threat to the extremist regime is its own paranoia. He said his fellow detainees included several children.'' In other heinous acts, ``the Taliban commanders killed 100 of our friends. They hung their bodies from lamp posts as a warning to the rest of us''.

Arab and Pakistani soldiers with the Taliban have also begun shooting young civilians of Uzbek and Tajik ethnic groups suspected of trying to escape to territory controlled by the Northern Alliance.

- PTI

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Section  : International
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