How Barq came to be living as a street child isn’t entirely clear, but local residents say he first arrived in the village in 2011, after a wealthy member of his extended clan married into a prominent Bayt al-Ahmar family. The practice of sending children to stay with a more affluent branch of their extended family is common in Yemen, where poverty forces many families to make difficult decisions. But Barq’s family members evidently declined to take him in, and he ended up living on the street.

Stranded between a father in Sanaa who couldn’t provide for him and a clan in Bayt al-Ahmar that didn’t seem to want him, Barq made do as best he could in the hamlet. Villagers say that during the day he wandered dusty side roads looking for plastic bottles and other bits of trash that he could sell. At night he took shelter where he could find it. Sometimes villagers would give him some food, or offer him a night inside. One of these villagers was Adnan al-Qadhi, who, according to local tribesmen, took pity on the dirty little boy. After a few months, Qadhi invited Barq into his home. He gave the boy a place to sleep and treated him like one of his own five children, feeding him and helping to finance his education.

When Adnan al-Qadhi landed on the kill list, U.S. officials reached out to some... compliant partners in Yemen, requesting assistance in locating their target. Could they help?

In the video, Barq explains that as the officers walked him through the process of using the chips, they stressed how important it was that he plant the chips on Adnan al-Qadhi on either Wednesday, October 31, or Thursday, November 1.

On Wednesday, October 31, when Qadhi went to the bathroom, the boy made his move.
“I climbed on the table where his coat was and put [a tracking chip] in his pocket,” Barq says. Scrambling to complete his mission before Qadhi came out of the bathroom, he slipped back to the floor and slid a second chip under a freestanding cupboard, just as he had been taught.

Later that day, apparently worried that the chip under the cupboard was too obvious, Barq removed it. But the first chip, the one in the pocket of Qadhi’s coat, was still in place and emitting a signal.
Neither the boy nor the man who had taken him in off the street could have known it yet, but by that point, Adnan al-Qadhi was effectively dead. All that was left was for a drone operator to push a button that would fire a missile.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan, located in Peshawar, Pakistan, and operated by the Afghan Mujahideen (holy warriors), published a series of primary education textbooks replete with images of Islamic militancy. These schoolbooks provided the Mujahideen (who, after a ten-year struggle, drove the Soviet occupying forces from Afghanistan in 1989) with a medium for promoting political propaganda and inculcating values of Islamic militancy into a new generation of holy warriors prepared to conduct jihad against the enemies of Islam. Consider the following introduction to the Persian alphabet in a first-grade language arts book:

Alif [is for] Allah.

Allah is one.

Bi [is for] Father (baba).

Father goes to the mosque…

Pi [is for] Five (panj).

Islam has five pillars…

Ti [is for] Rifle (tufang).

Javed obtains rifles for the Mujahideen…

Jim [is for] Jihad.

Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahideen…

Dal [is for] Religion (din).

Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam…

Zhi [is for] Good news (muzhdih).

The Mujahideen missiles rain down like dew on the Russians. My brother gave me good news that the Russians in our country taste defeat…

Shin [is for] Shakir.

Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes happy with the defeat of the Russians…

Zal [is for] Oppression (zulm).

Oppression is forbidden. The Russians are oppressors. We perform jihad against the oppressors…

Vav [is for] Nation (vatn).

Our nation is Afghanistan…. The Mujahideen made our country famous…. Our Muslim people are defeating the communists. The Mujahideen are making our dear country free.

As in this passage, the promotion of violence for the sake of Islam is the predominate theme throughout the Mujahideen textbook series in both mathematics and language arts for grades one through six.

Although these violent images were officially edited out of the schoolbooks in 1992, my fieldwork in Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan in 1999 and 2000 revealed that the unedited versions of these textbooks were still in use in both countries. Aid workers reported that the unedited versions promoting violence occasionally surfaced in classrooms in Pakistan and were sanctioned by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Peshawar’s secondhand bookshops regularly stocked the old textbooks, which are filled with messages of Islamic militancy and illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers, and automatic weapons.

When I visited Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, in May 2000, I discovered that the stores stocking Taliban-approved textbooks were selling freshly printed copies of the old, unrevised Mujahideen texts. Reports coming out of Kabul confirm the continued use of these schoolbooks, even as the new interim government assumed power. These textbooks glorify martyrdom, celebrate jihad, and speak of execution of “the enemy.”

This textbook series was underwritten by U.S. grants. One of the responsibilities of the mujahidin-operated Education Center for Afghanistan was to write, print, and distribute textbooks. The ECA was funded by the Education Program for Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), under a $50 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development that ran from September 1986 through June 1994. The UNO program staff chose to ignore the images of militancy in the children’s textbooks during the first five years of the program.