Al-Qaida in Iraq training children, officials say

BAGHDAD — The Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq is training boys as young as 10 to kidnap and kill, U.S. and Iraqi officials asserted Wednesday, showing propaganda videos seized from suspected insurgent hide-outs that depict masked boys wielding guns and kicking down doors.

"Al-Qaida in Iraq wants to poison the next generation of Iraqis," Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman, told reporters.

The five videos were found during a raid Dec. 4 in Khan Bani Saad, north of Baghdad, in the insurgent hotbed of Diyala province. The authenticity of the videos could not independently be verified.

In the videos, boys in black balaclavas and soccer jerseys jump out of a blue van, hop over a mud wall and storm a house where a family is asleep. In another scene, boys are seen ordering a man out of his car and escorting him away at gunpoint. Adults speaking Arabic with an Iraqi accent are heard giving the boys instructions.

U.S. soldiers, Smith said, have previously found propaganda material involving children but not in the detail seen in the videos.

Smith described two incidents involving teenage suicide bombers but said such cases weren't a trend. He couldn't offer statistics on the number of children who have joined the insurgency. He said the children in the videos did not appear to have been kidnapped or forced to act like insurgents. None of the boys was in custody, Smith said.