WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The photos are horrific. The most recent shows children in Fallujah, Iraq, dancing gleefully while teen-agers tear at the immolated bodies of four murdered American aid workers. In another set, circulated earlier this week by The Associated Press, 16-year-old Hussam Abdo, a Palestinian youth, is shown at an Israeli military checkpoint in Nablus. The youth's hands are atop his head. Around his torso is a vest containing 18 pounds of high-powered explosives. The child isn't simply transporting the bomb, he is the bomb. Young Abdo is the fourth Palestinian child rigged with explosives to be detected by Israeli soldiers and police in the past week. The youngest was just 11.

Using children in armed conflict is hardly a new idea. It's a brutal reality of war that has been employed for centuries -- dating back to before the Crusades. Around the world today, it is believed that upward of 500,000 children have been drafted, captured or enslaved by government or rebel forces to kill or be killed. In places like the Congo, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, to name just a few, children as young as seven years old are forced to facilitate or carry out unspeakable variations of torture and murder.

But in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Chechnya -- indeed much of the Islamic world -- radical Jihadists have perfected the process of turning out child killers. In madrassas -- so-called religious schools -- all over Islam, young boys are "educated" to hate, kill and kill themselves. They are promised that if they die the right way -- as a martyr killing a Christian or a Jew -- they will reap spiritual rewards for themselves and financial rewards for their family. For youngsters ill-equipped with life skills -- ignorant of math, science, chemistry, biology or physics -- and indoctrinated in how to die -- it's a short step to suicide terrorism.

Hussam Abdo, the 16-year-old Palestinian bomber, is described by his family as "gullible." He'd be dead today but for an alert Israeli soldier suspicious about why, on a warm day, the child was wearing a heavy, oversized coat that fell to his knees, with long sleeves concealing his hands. Despite claims by Palestinian terror leaders that they "condemn the use of children under the age of 18 for attacking the Zionist enemy," Israeli security officials believe that bomb-rigged children may have been used to perpetrate as many as a half-dozen terror attacks in the last three years.

Jihadist propaganda campaigns, sermons by local imams and speeches by radical political leaders routinely promise "hero status" to those who martyr themselves. Eyad al-Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza, told USA Today: "At the age of 12, children start to look for role models. In the States, you have celebrities and athletes. In our part of the world, it is the martyr."

Wafa Idris, the first known female suicide bomber, killed herself and one Israeli, and wounded 140 others on Jan. 27, 2002. The Al Aksr Martyr's Brigade extolled her as a "true child of Palestine." Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the recently killed head of Hamas, proclaimed Wafa to be "a model" for Palestinian women. But her mother, Wasfiya Idris, told Western reporters: "If I had known her intentions, I would have hidden her under the bed. Whoever says a mother is happy when her child becomes a martyr is lying."

This week, Hamas and Hezbollah announced they are setting up shop in Iraq to recruit young men -- meaning children -- for terrorist operations against the "occupation forces." They are apparently concerned that, to date, all the suicide terrorists who have blown themselves to pieces in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had to be recruited elsewhere.

And therein lies an opportunity for the Iraqi people. Thus far, despite the horror of what happened this week in Fallujah, all the suicide terrorists in Iraq have apparently been outsiders -- young men from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen and Palestine. In part, that's because Saddam did not permit radical clerics to open madrassas in Iraq. And since the fall of Baghdad, Coalition forces have worked overtime to open secular schools that offer an alternative to radical jihadism -- schools that teach life skills rather than hatred and death. Every military unit in Iraq -- U.S. and allied -- has adopted a school. And now they are getting help themselves. Continued...