"Dozens of ... mentally handicapped children are being used by insurgents to fight US and Iraqi forces."

Remember last March when there was a suicide attack on a market in Baghdad’s Adhamiyah neighbourhood, and it was reported that two children were in the car that detonated?

“They [the children] were put in the back of a car with another two adults in the front. The military let their car pass though the check point since it had children as passengers. When they reached the market, they [the adults] left the car with the children inside and detonated a bomb in the vehicle, killing the children and another five Iraqis,” Khalid Sami, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, said.

“Those children were later identified to have had mental problems and for sure they didn’t know what they were doing there,” Sami added.

Officials at a local NGO, who refused to be named for security reasons, said they had received many reports that mentally handicapped children were being used in insurgent attacks, especially in cities such as Diyala, Ramadi and Fallujah.

“Some children were given by their families but many others were kidnapped by insurgents when they knew that those children had mental problems. Some of them were even taken from the doors of their houses or schools,” the NGO’s spokesperson said. “We have registered many cases of the disappearance of children with mental problems. According to information we got from Anbar province, those children are working with insurgents.”

Read the whole story here.

[al-qaeda] [Iraq] [Baghdad] [suicide bombers] [mentally handicapped] [Adhamiyah]