Kabul, Feb 4: A 10-year-old Afghan boy who was declared a hero after fighting the Taliban has been shot dead by insurgents while on his way to school, officials said on Wednesday.
The deputy police chief of Uruzgan province, Rahimullah Khan, said the boy, Wasil Ahmad, was killed in Tirin Kot, the capital of the southern province.
The boy had fought the Taliban alongside his uncle on many occasions, Khan said. Photographs on social media showed ten-year-old Ahmad holding an automatic weapon and wearing uniform and a helmet.
Khan said that unknown gunmen he referred to only as insurgents had killed the boy near his home.
Ahmad’s uncle was formerly a Taliban commander who changed allegiance to the government and was appointed local police commander in Khas Uruzgan district, Khan said.
The use of child soldiers is illegal in Afghanistan, but the charity Child Soldiers International says both government forces and insurgents have been recruiting minors for years.
In a report presented to the U.N. Security Council’s working group on children and armed conflict, the London-based charity said children were recruited by the Afghan National Police and the Afghan Local Police for reasons that included a sense of fulfilling filial duty, patriotism and honor. But the main reason was poverty, it said in the June 2015 report.
It said that in May last year the charity found that half of national police check posts in Tirin Kot “were staffed with visibly younger officers,” who all admitted they were under 18 years old.
“The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission laid blame for the boy’s death with his family, the government and the Taliban, a militant group that has been fighting a 15-year insurgency.
