Canadians Transfered Child Detainees to Notorious Afghan Security Agency

An unknown number of children believed to be working with the Taliban have been turned over to Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security.

A secret government report obtained by the CBC reveals that for years Canadian Forces have been transferring child detainees to the NDS, an agency accused of torture. The same report says that children were being detained at a detention centre at Kandahar Airfield for “a significant period.” The issue of children working for the insurgency poses a major dilemma for NATO, because while international law dictates that countries have an obligation to remove juveniles from armed conflict and rehabilitate them, they might also have valuable information that would only be revealed through detention and interrogation. The UN’s special representative for child soldiers Radikha Coomaraswamy said that children captured in Afghanistan should be handed over to UNICEF or other civilian agencies.