(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - "You won't go to paradise. Killing yourself and killing others is forbidden in Islam but Wahhabist practice," he tells the men sitting on chairs arranged in rows in the brightly lit room, and points to pages in the holy book Qur’an.
The new program was designed by Afghanistan's National Directorate Security, long reviled for abuse and torture of detainees.
Security officials at the directorate say they are trying to draw the poison out of the young minds by teaching them the holy Qur’an.
They also take the men to mosques in Kabul to show people praying peacefully and proving their instigators were wrong.
The new method was sort of brainwashing for those young men, said Lutfullah Mashal, chief spokesman of the NDS, which last week gave Reuters rare access to the prisoners under supervision
“We work with them psychologically,” he said.
“We show them movies and films of atrocities of the Taliban (Wahhabi extrimists) and we also take them to mosques to see thousands of worshippers.
“During our interviews with them, we found that most of them do not know what they are doing. They are told false stories about Afghanistan,” he added.
The Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, were ousted by the United States, which invaded Afghanistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Since then, Taliban fighters have engaged in protracted guerrilla warfare against the US-led foreign troops and the West-backed Hamid Karzai government.
In the past two years, violence became at its worst across Afghanistan, with civilian and military casualties at record levels despite the presence of 150,000 foreign troops.
Suicide attacks, unknown in Afghanistan until 2004, have become particularly worrying as newly minted government forces take control of security ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign combat troops in 2014.
They account for the highest number of deaths of civilians and military forces after roadside bombings.
The attacks have prompted authorities to fortify government buildings and foreign offices with rows upon rows of blast walls to stop the bombers.
PROMISE OF PARADISE
Wahab, 18, originally from Kunduz in the Afghan north, but who grew up in Pakistan's garrison city of Rawalpindi where he worked as a porter in a fruit market, said he was approached by a man identified as Sarfraz several months ago.
"I was told stories about Afghanistan, about atrocities by foreigners and the absence of Islamic practices," Wahab said as two NDS agents sat nearby. He was given 15 days of training at a camp for Afghan refugees near the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on how to set off a car bomb.
"I was sent to Mazar-e-Sharif to target the foreigners and despite attempting four times, my car did not explode," he said, speaking slowly in Pashto.
Afghanistan says thousands of Wahhabi terrorists routinely cross over from Pakistan's lawless, ethnic Pashtun tribal lands to carry out acts of violence. It has repeatedly urged its neighbour to act against the militants.
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