Let the planet be safe for children at least

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have long used children in war. One 14-year-old bomber on a bicycle hit the Kabul NATO base in 2012 killing six people. Two years later in 2014 a teenager blew himself up at the French cultural centre in the Afghan capital Kabul. Researchers and officials say Islamic State and other militants are now increasingly using the same tactics, perhaps to build ranks depleted by losses, preserve adult fighters or simply catch security forces off guard.
The attack on August 20, 2016 at the wedding in Gaziantep marked not only Turkey's deadliest this year, but also the first time in Turkey that militant may have deployed a child bomber in a way already used to deadly effect in wars from Africa to Syria.  The blast tore into celebrations at a Kurdish wedding on the street late at night on August 20, 2016. As many as 22 of the dead were under the age of 14.  
Juliette Touma, a UNICEF regional spokesperson, has said that the child recruitment across the region is increasing. Children are taking a much more active role, receiving training on the use of heavy weapons, manning checkpoints on the frontlines, being used as snipers and in extreme cases being used as suicide bombers. Little has been publicly released about the attacker in the Gaziantep bombing. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on August 21, 2016 that the bomber was between 12 to 14 years old, and that Islamic State was probably responsible.
No one claimed the attack, but Islamic State in the past has targeted Kurdish gatherings to stir ethnic tensions. Turkey's prime minister was more cautious on August 22, 2016 saying it was too early to say who carried out the attack, though security sources say witnesses reported the bomber was a child. Turkish authorities are also investigating whether militants may have placed the explosives on the suspect, without his or her knowledge before detonating them from a distant place.
In West Africa, Boko Haram has preyed on displaced children or young girls it kidnapped to force them to become bombers. In Iraq and Syria, activists say Islamic State, took in children from towns it captures or recruited families to its territory, and indoctrinated their children in its schools and camps. Islamic State in particular, highlights its child recruits for its "Cubs of the Caliphate" brigades, publishing images and videos on social media of children receiving training and indoctrination, and carrying out bombings or executions.
That tactic has been used before in Iraq, where children or even mentally disadvantaged adults have been dispatched as unwitting bomb couriers into markets and checkpoints before they are blown up from afar. In the failed attack in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk a day later, local television images and photographs showed the boy crying and screaming as he was grabbed by Iraqi security forces near an interior ministry building. The boy looked scared and younger than 16 when Iraqi police grabbed him on the street in the northern city of Kirkuk. Pulling off his shirt, they found a two-kilogram bomb strapped to his skinny frame. That was on August 21, 2016.
Less than a day earlier, Turkey was less fortunate: a teenage bomber detonated his suicide vest among dancing guests at a Turkish wedding party, officials say, killing 51 people, nearly half of them children themselves. Security officials said the boy is 16 years old, though local media reports said he was much younger. He is an Iraqi national from Mosul, the largest urban centre still under Islamic State control, which Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces backed by the United States (US) air strikes are moving to liberate.   
Hisham al-Hashimi, an analyst and author who advises the Iraqi government on Islamic State, says militants this year had reactivated their Heaven's Youth Brigade, in reaction to the group's battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria. He also said teenagers are easier to recruit for suicide missions, especially in moments of suffering or despair having lost loved ones. They also attract less attention and less suspicion than male adults. Also in world news as US Secretary of State John Kerry lands in Nigeria, air force says top Boko Haram fighters killed a German to accept hundreds of migrants to boost European Union (EU) program: Italy Kurdish group in near full control of Syria's Hasaka city.
Child recruits who have escaped from Islamic State ranks in its base in Syria's Raqaa have described how they were taught to handle weapons, and also how to detonate suicide belts. A study in February 2016 for Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point military academy that examined Islamic State propaganda on child and youth "martyrs" between January 2015 and January 2016, found three times as many suicide operations involving children over the year.
The study said that they represent an effective form of psychological warfare to project strength, pierce defences, and strike fear into enemy soldiers' hearts. Islamic State is mobilising children and youths at an alarming rate. Those tactics are mirrored in West Africa where United Nations (UN) officials have tracked a rise in attacks like the one carried out by a girl as young as ten who last year exploded a bomb in a busy market place in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 16 people. Security sources at the time said the explosive device was wrapped around her body.
In an April 2016 report, UNICEF said attacks involving child suicide bombers between 2014 and this year rose four-fold in northeastern Nigeria, where militant group Boko Haram is based, and neighbouring Cameroon, Niger and Chad. A 12-year-old Nigerian girl captured with explosives in Cameroon in March 2016 told police she had been abducted by Boko Haram after the group overran her village a year earlier. According to the UNICEF report, nearly two thirds of all the child attackers they tracked were girls. In the first six months of this year 2016 alone, UNICEF says it has also noted 38 child suicide bombers in West Africa. Thierry Delvigne-Jean of the agency's west and central Africa office said that this is one of the defining features of this conflict.
But we appeal to the parties concerned that let the planet earth be a safe place for the children at least - the use of children at war is not at all Islamic nor a humane gesture to mankind even. In an Islamic sense war is a kind of hoodwinking and the Prophet (SM) of Islam declared that one who hoodwinks is not at all his follower.

The writer is a retired Professor of Economics, BCS General Education Cadre.
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