UN Official On Wild Goose Chase

Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:35:04 pm PST

A UN official is planning to ask the spiritual leaders of the Islamic world to issue a fatwa prohibiting the use of children as suicide bombers.

Good luck with that.

BRUSSELS, April 12 (KUNA) — A top United Nations official is to travel to Iraq soon to look into the issue of children being recruited by the militia and also being used as suicide bombers.

“We are seeing this phenomenon of child suicide bombers beginning now in Iraq. For the first time there are reports about that,” the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, told KUNA in an exclusive interview in Brussels. She noted also that there are hundreds of children in detention in jails run by Iraqi as well as American authorities in Iraq.

Coomaraswamy said she hopes to visit Baghdad at the end of this month to look at the situation more closely — linked with the abuse of children.

“We would like that religious leaders of Iraq and the Muslim word, and one of the things I hope to do is to lobby them, issue a fatwa (religious decree) against using children in conflicts.”