The US-led forces fighting the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan might soon encounter 'gun-totting' monkeys, trained for 'jihad', if a rumour doing the rounds in the Chinese media is to be believed.
NATO officials and military experts have scoffed at the report originating in the Chinese media, which says that the Taliban are training monkeys to fight the US-led military.
The New York Post cited the state-run People's Daily as saying that the Taliban is "training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops".
"... the Taliban forces have tried any possible means and figured out a method to train monkeys as 'replacement killers' against American troops," Stars and Stripes quoted the Chinese daily as saying.
The militants were arming the primates with AK-47 rifles, machine guns and trench mortars in the Waziristan tribal region bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan, it claimed.
The monkeys soldiers are being turned into snipers at a secret Taliban training base and are in turn being rewarded with 'bananas and peanuts'.
"We have absolutely nothing that leads us to believe that this tale could be even remotely based in reality," said NATO spokesman Lt Col Todd Breasseale when asked to react on the report.
Christopher Coe, director of the Harlow Primate Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, questioned the authenticity of the pictures that were carried with the report, showing a primate grinning next to a machine gun.
"To my eye at least, it is a baboon, which lives in Africa," Coe said. "The more common monkey that lives in that part of the world is a rhesus monkey. They live in India and can also be found in China. But this photo is not of a rhesus monkey".
Coe said the noise of weapon fire would certainly scare most animals. "While you could train a monkey to shoot a gun, I certainly wouldn't want to be anywhere in the neighbourhood after that. I rather doubt you could trust its aim," he said. Afghanistan's Taliban warlords have developed a bizarre way to deal with foreign forces: they have trained monkeys who love to eat bananas and peanuts to be killers. Taliban forces have taught monkeys how to use the Kalashnikov, Bren light machine gun and trench mortars. They also teach them how to identify and attack soldiers wearing U.S. military uniforms.
Ironically, the idea of training monkeys to fight was first invented by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA in the Vietnam War initiated a program that used the peanuts and bananas as prizes to train some "monkey soldiers" to kill Vietnamese in the jungle, according to a report by British media on June 27, 2010.
It is reported that these monkey soldiers are mainly composed of macaques and baboons hunted at an early age in the jungle and sold to the Taliban. These monkey babies who lost their mothers are sent to a secret Taliban training base one-by-one to become killer monkeys. Taliban militants use a series of rewards and punishments to gradually teach them how to use the lethal weapons. Recently, a British journalist went to Pakistan and Afghanistan border of Waziristan's tribal region where he witnessed a few of the monkey soldiers armed with an AK-47 rifle and Bren light machine gun. Taliban militants in the past have strictly kept the program secret.
However, Taliban leaders have recently taken the initiative show monkey soldiers to tourists of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area. Apparently, the Taliban look on monkeys as "propaganda tools."
"If a person who loves animals knows the monkeys may be injured in the war, they might pressure the government to force the withdrawal of western forces in Afghanistan," said one Taliban insider.
A senior U.S. military source confirmed the existence of the Taliban monkey soldiers, military experts call armed monkeys "monkey terrorists."
