Osama mistreated women and children but will it stop now?

I was awake when the news of Osama Bin Laden's death came through. It was about 3.30am in the early hours of Sunday. The reason I was awake was because my mobile phone was beeping (low battery). My mother was wakened too and turned on the TV. We were stunned. My first thought was for the women and children who lived in fear of being harmed by Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda have been using women and children with learning difficulties or disabilities as suicide bombers. In January 2005 in Iraq Al Qaeda used a child with Downs Syndrome to carry out a suicide attack at a polling stations which left more than 40 people dead.

In March 2005 Al Qaeda placed a bomb in a car with two children in the back seat.  U.S. soldiers saw the children and became less suspicious so they let the car through a Baghdad checkpoint. When the car got through the checkpoint, the adult passengers parked the car and ran away, detonating the car with the children inside.


In November, 2005 a woman with learning difficulties was used by Al Qaeda in a bombing incident that killed herself and seven other Iraqis including a child.

Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead I hope the ideology of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who are closely linked to Al Qaeda, will profoundly change the ways in which it treats women and children. I am hoping that Osama's followers were just carrying out his orders. Now that he is dead I hope that this type of command will be wiped out.