War Child -The Growing Number of Child-Soldiers Found on the World's Battlefields & The Need
With hands barely able to wrap themselves around the pistol grip and fingers hardly long enough to pull the triggers of the assault rifles most of them carry, the world is seeing more and more children enter the battlefield.
From the Congo to Iraq, from Gaza City to Syria, children are being put into uniform and handed the weapons of war. While we here in the United States watch our pre-teens figure out how to operate their new I-Phone or Tablet. In Syria, 12 year olds are being instructed on how to use RPG's and AK-47's.
From the forces of FARC to the house-to house fighting in the cities of Syria, ten's of thousands of children are serving as soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. These boys and girls, some as young as 8 years old, serve in government forces and armed opposition groups. Many fight on the front lines. Others participate in suicide missions. Some act as spies, messengers, or lookouts. Girls may be forced into sexual slavery. Many are abducted or recruited by force, while others join out of desperation, believing that these various armed groups offer their best chance for survival in what they see as a world gone mad.
It is estimated that as many as 400,000 children from ages 7 to 18 are currently ( 2015 - 2016 ) serving in active combat roles world-wide. Most notably child soldiers are found in Central and South America, Africa, Syria, and Iraq.
In the nation of Somalia alone, a report published by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has estimated that since 1991, over 200,000 children carried arms or had been recruited into that country's militias against their will. The so-called 'Boy Brigades' of the Congolese rebel forces in Africa are another brutal example of children pressed into military service.
Unfortunately, using children in warfare is not a modern phenomenon. The practice in many military forces to use children in combat rolls dates as far back as pre-Roman times. The real turning point in our attitudes to child soldiers came in the 19th century, particularly as a result of the American Civil War, which was often referred to as the "boys' war". Between a tenth and a third of all the troops in that conflict were under age, often absurdly so. John Clem, the famous "drummer boy of Shiloh", was recruited into the United States Army at the age of 10.
The unprecedented carnage of the Second World War saw for the first time the mass usage of children as front-line troops in an industrialized war. By the end of the Second World War, after the grotesque militarism of the Hitler Youth decayed into the slaughter of the school-boys sent out to defend Berlin to the last, the international consensus had hardened. It is estimated that as many as 30,000 German teens between the ages of 12 to 17, both boys and girls which had been schooled for years to be fanatical followers of their brutal dictator, were killed in the fight for Berlin alone. From Vietnam to the streets of Fallujah to the hills of Afghanistan we have seen child soldiers fighting on the battlefields. Our own armed forces have faced child-soldiers in modern combat. The first American soldier to die under hostile fire in Afghanistan, Sgt. Nathan R. Chapman ( a member of the elite Special Forces) was killed in an ambush by a 14-year-old boy.
Today we see fighting in the Middle East, fighting in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq, and through-out that troubled region of the world. And we must ask ourselves, how much of that is our fault? How many children have been handed weapons and marched into war because of the policies of the United States over the last 35 or 40 years? We marched into Iraq on false intelligence on the orders of Washington D.C. Hawks. We have destabilized an entire region for what seems to be the needs of the military industrial complex and it's desire to sell yet another weapons system, or the wishes of the worlds energy producers to protect vast oil reserves which lay under the graves of these child-soldiers. Many of our citizens are convinced something is seriously wrong when our government is willing to spend over $1.65 trillion ( Yes with a T ) on the failed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program but balks at the idea of universal healthcare or publicly paid higher education. Many point to the fact that the United States could more readily afford these social programs if we didn't spend as much on our military as the next 26 nations combined, 25 of which are our allies...
Outside of the campaign of Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, running for the Democratic nomination, this election cycle doesn't seem to hold much hope for a change in U.S. foreign policy. Indeed the front runner for the Democratic Nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seems to be only slightly less Hawkish than the probable GOP opponent, Donald Trump. Senator Sanders foreign policy goals of less regional involvement and working more with our allies in unstable regions, like the Middle East, would perhaps garner more stable and peaceful results than the use of smart-bombs and Special Ops. In Sander stated view, nation like Saudi Arabia should have a more direct roll in the policies and events of their region while the United States assumes a more supportive roll instead of direct intervention. Sanders is correct in that the United States can no longer be the Policeman of the world, nor should we want to be.
With ever-growing instability in the Middle East and elsewhere, perhaps it is time to re-think how our nation needs to conduct itself on the world stage. Perhaps, it might be time to try helping to solve the problems of the world by working with the other nations in it instead of beating our chests, rattling our swords, and sending troops. Perhaps, possibly, it is time to stop our policy of "nation-building" and start building working relationships that would actually see less children on the battlefield and more of them on the soccer-field... or possibly even in the classroom.
