Jihadist Video Shows Boy Beheading Man

Ghulam Sakhi, father of a militant Ghulam Nabi shows the video grab picture of his son distributed by executioners in the area, during an interview with The Associated Press at his home in a remote village Kili Faqiran in southwestern Pakistan, Thursday April 19, 2007. A video received by The Associated Press this week records the grisly death of Ghulam Nabi, a militant accused of betraying a top deputy to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani who was killed in a December airstrike in Afghanistan. Sakhi, said his son was a loyal Taliban member who had fought in Afghanistan and sheltered its leaders in the mud-walled family compound - and said he wanted to avenge his death. (AP Photo/Abdul Rahman) (Abdul Rahman - AP)

He said Nabi also bought weapons for Taliban fighters and organized medical treatment for those injured during fighting in Afghanistan.

Some days after Osmani's death, Nabi went to Peshawar and then to Wana, a tribal town considered a militant stronghold, to collect money from Taliban officials to buy guns and food for militants in Afghanistan, Sakhi said.

He said his son called at the end of January to reveal that a tribal council had sentenced him to death on charges of tipping off U.S. forces about Osmani's movements, despite his denials.

His son passed the phone to Dadullah, but the militant leader ignored his pleas for clemency, Sakhi said.

"I talked to him and said you visited us and my son was a close friend so why are you going to hang him? He just said, 'How are you?', and switched off the phone," Sakhi said.

"They are the enemies of Islam," he said of the Taliban. "They are behaving like savages."

Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for Human Rights Watch, said the use of a child to commit such an act constituted a war crime and was a "new low" in the conflict in Afghanistan.

He noted the Taliban had teenage combatants but they were not recruited on a large scale because of the availability of adult fighters. He said he had seen children in the background of some jihadist videos but none in which they were directly involved in violence.

"I don't know why they would do this," Zarifi said. "The Taliban have to some extent tried to play to the public in Afghanistan and have not engaged in the complete sowing of mayhem that we have seen in Iraq. But this kind of act is really egregious. It's off the charts."