Child fighters at war

SHARIF was 10 when his religious teacher led his class into a poor neighborhood of Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu to pray for a sick relative. Suddenly, Islamist fighters jumped from the shadows and ordered the children onto buses — the beginning of a terrifying two years as a child soldier.
The class was taken to a training base in the south of the anarchic country, said Sharif, where Somali and foreign instructors showed them how to use weapons and set ambushes.

Insurgents show off their weapons while prospective recruits, including school-going children, look on. — AP

The boy said that before battle, he was sometimes given drugs that made him feel like he could “pick up a tank and throw it aside like a telephone”.
The recruitment of school-going children as child fighters in Somalia is on the rise, both by the government and particularly by the country’s most powerful Islamist militia, al-Shabab, whose name means “the youth”.
Al-Shabab’s recruitment of children may partly stem from a lack of willing adults, who have been alienated by Islamist attacks on traditional Sufi saints and bans on everything from chewing qat, a mild narcotic leaf, to school bells and music.


Full story: The Star Online