Pat Dollard | Young Americans

BAGHDAD - Videotapes seized during U.S. raids on suspected al-Qaida in Iraq hide-outs show the terror group training young boys to kidnap and assassinate civilians, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

Footage aired for reporters showed an apparent training operation with black-masked boys—some of whom appeared to be about age 10—storming a house and holding guns to the heads of residents. Another tape showed a young boy wearing a suicide vest and posing with automatic weapons.

The American military said some of the tapes were found in December during a U.S. raid in Khan Bani Saad, northeast of Baghdad, and said it indicated a pattern that al-Qaida in Iraq was increasingly using children for sinister means.

But U.S. and Iraqi officials said they could offer no estimate on how many children have fallen under the terror group’s control. They named just a handful of attacks blamed on women or children, including twin pet market bombings Friday in Baghdad in which U.S. and Iraqi officials said two mentally retarded women were strapped with remote- controlled explosives.

“Al-Qaida in Iraq wants to poison the next generation of Iraqis,” Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman, told reporters Wednesday inside the heavily guarded Green Zone. “It is offering children as the new generation of mujahedeen,” he said, using the Arabic term for holy warriors.

“We believe this video is used as propaganda to send out to recruit other boys … and to send a broader message across Iraq to indoctrinate youth into al-Qaida,” he said.

Smith said that prior to 2007, five women had been responsible for suicide bombings and other attacks across Iraq. Ten women have carried out attacks since then, and there have been four female suicide bombers already so far in 2008, he said.

Other scenes from the Khan Bani Saad video showed masked boys forcing a man off his bicycle at gunpoint and stopping a car and kidnapping its driver along a dusty country road. At one point the boys—wearing soccer jerseys with ammunition slung across their chests—sit in a circle on the floor, chanting slogans in support of al-Qaida.

Militants are kidnapping more and more Iraqi children, Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari told reporters, though he could not offer details or numbers.

“This is not only to recruit them, but also to demand ransom to fund the operations of al-Qaida,” al-Askari said.

(AP)