The Youngest Terrorists

Barely old enough to drive, one Afghan teenager was about to take his last ride, video shows. And packed into the back of the battered car are pounds of homemade explosives.

The adults around him have spent months preparing him for this: A car bomb attack on a coalition convoy in the mountains of Afghanistan, CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports.

That was to have been the fate of the 14-year-old, who is now sitting in a prison cell of the Afghan intelligence service.

A few weeks ago, Shukirullah was at a madrasa, a religious school, across the border in Pakistan, studying the Koran, when his teachers told him he was ready to graduate.

"The Imam told me they were sending me to Afghanistan to become a suicide bomber," Shukirullah said through a translator. "I told him I wanted to go home to see my mother."

Without the knowledge of his parents, the boy was sent on a journey far from his family, across the border to the Afghan city of Khost.

"I was afraid," Shukirullah said. "I tried to escape, but there was no way."

Shukirullah was rescued when soldiers raided the house he was held in and found explosives.

With a dramatic increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan since 2006, more of those attacks are now being carried out by children.

"Commanders have found that 13-, 14-, 15-year-old boys are particularly easy to manipulate. These children often don't know what they are being asked to do, or they are being told lies in order to carry out the attacks," said Jo Becker of Human Rights Watch.

And there is growing evidence that some of Pakistan's religious schools are being exploited by extremists as a ready source of recruits.

Those students aren't the first. A recruitment DVD, circulated in the markets and madrasas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, shows children firing machine guns almost as big as they are.

Most chilling is video of one boy, believed to be about twelve, sentencing an accused American spy to death, and then, encouraged by adults off-camera, wields a knife to behead him.

His future? To be a suicide bomber.

As for Shukirullah, the boy who escaped death: he now faces trial, and years in prison.

Saved from one tragedy, but still facing another.