Here, in the same week that President Bush’s made his infamous aircraft carrier landing proclamation, an Iraqi 12 year old boy fired on U.S. A typical incident in the contentious city of Mosul just after the invasion provided a worrisome indicator of the threat to come. Beaten on the battlefield, rebel leaders sought to mobilize this cohort of trained and indoctrinated young fighters. The implications of this training and involvement in military activities by large numbers of Iraqi youth was soon felt in the guerilla war that followed. This is in addition to the many instances of children being used as human shields by regime loyalists during the fighting. During the invasion, American forces engaged with Iraqi child soldiers in fighting in at least three cities (Nasariya, Mosul, and Karbala). This included the Ashbal Saddam (“Saddam’s Lion Cubs”), a paramilitary force of boys between the ages of 10-15 that acted as a feeder into the noted Saddam Fedayeen units that proved more aggressive than the Iraqi army during the invasion. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq built up an entire apparatus in the 1990s designed to pull children into the military realm and bolster populace control. They were housed in a special wing entitled “Camp Iguana.” As the Pentagon took more than a year to figure out whether to prosecute or rehabilitate them, the kids spent their days in a house on the beach converted into a makeshift prison, watching DVDs (their favorites were Castaway and Call of the Wild) and learning English and math. forces in Afghanistan in the initial fighting and were taken to the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At least six young boys between the ages of 13 and 16 have been captured by U.S. soldier killed in the war on terrorism was a Green Beret killed by a 14 year old sniper in Afghanistan. force after 9-11, from Afghanistan to the Philippines, child soldiers are present in every conflict zone U.S. Its important to note that with the global deployment of U.S. That is, recovery from the traumas of war is hard enough it’s all the more difficult when the soldier in question is a child. A particularly troubling aspect then is not only what happens during the fighting, but the legacy it leaves for children after the fighting is done. In turn wars are harder to end, such that the wars drag on, consuming societies and childhood itself for literally hundreds of thousands of children. With children’s involvement, warlords, terrorists, and rebel leaders alike are finding that conflicts are easier to start. The result is that war in the 21st century is not only more prevalent, but more tragic.
SMALL SOLDIERS GAME BOY CONTROLS FULL
The children are often abducted to fight and participate in all the full horrors of war indeed they are sometimes forced to carry out atrocities that adults shy away from. An additional half million children serve in armed forces not presently at war. Underage girls have been present in armed groups in 55 countries.Ĭhildren now serve in 40% of the world’s armed forces, rebel groups, and terrorist organizations and fight in almost 75% of the world’s conflicts indeed, in the last five years, children have served as soldiers on every continent but Antarctica. Roughly 30% of the armed forces that employ child soldiers also include girl soldiers. The youngest ever terrorist bomber a 7 year old in Colombia. The youngest ever was an armed 5 year old in Uganda. Their average age is just over 12 years old. There are as many as 300,000 children under the age of 18 presently serving as combatants around the globe. The practice of child soldiers is far more widespread, and more important, than most realize. The participation of children is now not a rarity, but instead a growing feature of war. Throughout the last four thousand years of war as we know it, children were never an integral, essential part of any military forces in history. However, these were the exceptions to what the rule used to be, that children had no place in war. forces fought against small numbers of underage Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) in the closing weeks of World War II. Child soldiers even fought in our own civil war, most notably when a unit of 247 Virginia Military Institute cadets fought with the Confederate Army in the battle of New Market (1864). For example, young pages armed the knights of the Middle Ages and drummer boys marched before Napoleonic armies. But while warfare has long been the domain of adults, juveniles have been present in armies in a number of instances in the past. When we think of warfare, children rarely come to mind. I thought it might make sense to start us out with a brief summary of the issue we face.