Taliban set up all women suicide squads

Meena Gul, trained to be a 'human bomb' was apprehended from the Munda area, in Dir close to the Afghan border in January, and her disclosures have sent shivers down the spine of Pakistani security establishment.

The disclosures of all women human time bomb squads come days after Pakistan's first woman suicide bomber targeted a UN aid distribution centre in the volatile tribal belt in the country's northwest, killing 46 people and injuring over 70 others.

The bomber, who was clad in a burqa, lobbed a grenade and then detonated her explosives when she was stopped at a checkpoint near a World Food Programme centre in Khar, the headquarters of Bajaur tribal region.

Gul said that women suicide bombers were trained for their deadly task in small cells on both sides of the porous border and were dispatched to their missions with a sermon, "God will reward you with a place in heaven".

The 12-year-old Afghan girl was quoted by the 'Express Tribune' as having told the police that she trained in a group which was headed by her sister-in-law Zainab and she battled Pakistani troops dressed as a man.

She claimed that her younger sister blew herself up in a suicide attack in Afghanistan, but she had managed to escape as she was too scared to die.

The Afghan girl was being prepared for suicide missions with her brother a Taliban commander telling her "You will go to heaven before any of us, if you blow up yourself the way I tell you".

But before she could be made to undertake a no-return mission, Meena Gul managed to escape from the clutches of the Taliban while waiting in a hideout to carryout suicide attacks as militant hideouts were reduced to ashes in a military bombardment.

The Afghan girl child has told her interrogators of suicide squads set up by the Taliban, but the security establishment took it lightly till they were shaken by the blast on the Christmas Day in the Bajaur tribal area.

The paper was told by the Peshawar Corps Commander, Lt Gen Asif Yasin Malik that the perpetrators of the Bajaur bombing were coming from Afghanistan.

"People in the tribal belt are being influenced from across the border", he said.

Express Tribune said Pakistani Taliban had always acknowledged their womens' wing. The Taliban's Mulla Radio Maulvi Faqir Muhammad in his clandestine FM broadcasts mentions the Taliban womens' suicide squads.

The paper said the presence of women bombers was bringing a cultural revolution in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and FATA.

Searching women was considered a taboo in Pakistan's tribal belt and if women were seated in a vehicle it was typically not checked by security personnel.

But, terrorism has changed all this. Now, women are equal suspects and are given no leeway.