Pak family sues school for forcing teenager to fight Taliban war

Authorities in Pakistan on Wednesday ordered an investigation into the disappearance of hundreds of teenage boys believed to have been forcibly sent to fight in Afghanistan's bloody civil war.

The investigation comes after the father of a 13-year-old boy filed a suit against a religious school in Karachi.

The Karachi police are investigating Farooq Ahmed's charge that his son Maroof Ahmed was kidnapped and sent to a battlefront near the Afghan capital, Kabul.

In May, the poor tailor enrolled his son in the Jamia Islamia School, one of hundreds of well-funded Islamic seminaries run by clerics across Pakistan. But when Ahmed went to visit Maroof last month, his son was gone.

Officials at the school in Karachi's Clifton district said Maroof and four classmates had gone to join the Taliban Islamic Militia's jihad (or holy war) in neighbouring Afghanistan, he said.

Ahmed was given a brief letter from his son, allegedly written from a frontline near Kabul.

''I will return home once Afghanistan is conquered by our forces,'' Maroof wrote.

Ahmed alleges the school forcibly sent his son to join the bloody civil war. ''He is too young to make a decision to go and fight,'' he said.

In an unprecedented move, Ahmed filed a petition in the high court in Sindh province to sue for his son's swift return home.

The court accepted the case and turned it over to police for investigation. After reports that many more seminary students had disappeared, the Sindh provincial government launched a wider investigation.

Most of the soldiers in the Taliban militia are Islamic seminarians-turned-guerilla fighters who studied in Pakistan while the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Thousands of new recruits have been sent in to aid the Taliban battle with the opposition coalition that controls the northern one-third of the country.

The Taliban is locked in a fierce civil war to impose its strict version of Islamic law, which bans women from work and forces men to pray in mosques across the country.

Taliban officials insist most of the new recruits are Afghan nationals who studied in Pakistan. Only a handful of Pakistanis have joined the fight out of dedication to the Taliban's Islamic cause, they say.

''More than 1,500 pupils have been sent to Afghanistan from various religious schools in Karachi alone,'' said Sharfuddin Memon, an official with the citizen-police liaison committee.

The Taliban have even set up a recruiting office in Karachi.

Many of the Pakistani minors have disappeared to Afghanistan without their parents' permission, he said. Only the bodies of those killed in the fighting have been returned home.

Officials at the Jamia Islamia have confirmed that more than 40 pupils from the school have joined the Taliban. But they insist the student warriors were volunteers.

''The school is not responsible for sending them,'' said Aziz Farooqi, a senior teacher and cleric.

Like most of Pakistan's seminary schools, Jamia Islamia has close ties to the extremist Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, a party which has been accused of funding the Taliban.

Afghanistan's Opposition leaders accuse Islamabad and several extremist Islamic parties in Pakistan of helping to train and arm the Taliban militia.

Pakistan denies it has any official ties with the radical Islamic movement, but admits many young Taliban warriors attended school here.

UNI