Peshawar, Pakistan - Eight-year-old Abid Mehmood was sifting through the debris of the bombed market in Pakistan's north-western city of Peshawar for metal and plastic pieces when he found something unusual - a human eyeball.

The remains of a body that the powerful blast might have burnt or even dissolved a day earlier had enough shine and colour to attract the child, who immediately collected it in a plastic bag.

Hours later, he found a plastic jar and dipped the eyeball in the water and started to pick through the rubble to find more.

"I have collected seven eyes but there should be one more. After all, every person has two eyes," said Mehmood as he showed the jar to a reporter.

"They look beautiful, don't they?" he said in the Meena Bazaar, the once-busy market where a suicide bomber killed 119 people and injured over 200 on October 28.

Indifference to death is increasingly becoming a defence mechanism for psychologically tormented children in Peshawar, where Taliban have killed several hundred people in dozens of suicide bombings over the last two years.

"We are seeing more and more children who show little reaction to death and the dead ones," Peshawar-based psychiatrist and social worker Dr Khalid Mufti said.

"The other day an 11-year-old child whose father died and brother lost his legs in a recent blast told me that he was waiting for his turn like everyone else in the town," added Mufti.

"The kid was smiling. You know, this is what the war does to children: it robs them of their innocence."

Some children who have survived a blast or witnessed the devastation are suffering from Hysterical aphonia, a psychological disorder where a person loses his ability to speak by seeing or experiencing a traumatic event.

Many others who have seen the streets littered with blood and severed limbs on television screens have flashbacks.

"They have nightmares and wake up in the night, screaming," Mufti said. "Our news channels have been rather less responsible. They should avoid airing gruesome scenes."

Children were staying in front of the television screens more after the twin suicide bombings at an Islamabad university in October prompted the government decision to close educational institutions nationwide for weeks.

The Taliban have recently blurred the distinction between civilian and official targets, apparently to avenge the ongoing army offensive in their South Waziristan heartland by making Pakistan look like a failed state that is unable to protect its citizens.

And this brutal scheme might be working, at least with the young children, many of whom have started to presume that the Taliban are growing more powerful than the state.

In North-West Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital, children have changed the traditional game of tag where the "cops" chased the "robbers." In the new version, Taliban pursue the police, and the strongest boy takes pride in leading the "militant team."

"The children go after a symbol of power. A policeman, a soldier or a judge is a symbol of power for those in a functional state," explained Mufti.

"But in a region where the Taliban have so far proved superior to the foreign forces (in Afghanistan) and Pakistani forces (in Pakistan), the inspirational symbols will automatically change," he added.

A suicide bomber, with capacity to cause maximum devastation, is emerging as a symbol of power for some children - not only those stricken by poverty and brainwashed at radical seminaries, but also those born into prosperity who study at English-language schools.

Dimitry Ivanov, a Russian journalist, was visiting a shopping centre in an upmarket neighbourhood in Pakistani capital Islamabad, when a 12-year-old child ran towards him shouting "some noises."

"First I thought the child was going to snatch my bag, I held it fast," said Ivanov. "Later on, my friend, who got frightened when the child approached us, explained to me that the child was pretending to be a suicide bomber."

Three or four friends of the child standing in one corner laughed loudly and clapped as they saw my friend, also a foreign journalist, getting frightened, Ivanov recalled. (dpa)