Sunday, May 09, 2010
The government in Somalia and many of the country’s militant groups, are recruiting children to fight their battles.
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.
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.
“Better informed, smarter, older people are saying they don’t want to join al-Shabab,” said E.J. Hogendoorn, an analyst at the International Crisis Group in Nairobi, Kenya.
“The sad reality with modern infantry weapons is that even a child can operate them.”
Taken by force
According to Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund), schoolchildren as young as nine are being targeted and often taken through force or deception, said Denise Shepherd-Johnson, a Nairobi-based spokeswoman, citing information received from monitors in Somalia.
“Children, especially of school-going age, are being systematically recruited and used in even larger numbers for military purposes by major combatant groups,” she said.
“The number of bases and camps used to train these children is widespread and appears to be growing.”
An aid worker in Kenya tracking child recruitment says cases verified by their partner organisations in Somalia have risen from five in September 2009 to 26 in January, when Somalia was awash with rumours of an imminent government offensive.
Since the government toned down its rhetoric, the numbers have fallen slightly to 20 children recruited in February and 18 in March.
The figures represent a small fraction of child fighters, the aid worker said, because they only record new recruits and many cases could not be fully documented due to the lack of security and existing conditions there.
Aid workers have often reported seeing scores of schoolchildren in camps, but were only able to verify the details of one or two, she said.
She asked for her name and her organisation’s name to be withheld to protect staff from retribution.
Human Rights Watch documented several cases of children fighting in militias in a report last month.
A mother said her sons aged 12 and 14 respectively had been seized by militants from an Islamic school.
Her uncle was killed for trying to find them, and she stopped trying after receiving death threats, the report said.
Sharif escaped last month, waiting until nightfall and then sneaking past the guards with six friends.
Now the slender, dark-eyed boy is too afraid to go home. If he does, his family could be killed by the insurgents who control their neighborhood.
As he talks about his fears, his quick smile disappears and his eyes drop to the floor. His voice slows to a mumble.
There are many things he didn’t want to talk about: the weapons training; the battles he said he was in; what happened to his classmates.
“I don’t know,” he said at first when asked what happened to the children taken along with him. Then later, he said: “I think they are dead.”
Sharif, who has had no contact with his parents for two years, said that they did not know he was being cared for by African Union peacekeepers. They had allowed the media to talk to Sharif on the condition that his last name wasn’t used in order to protect him and his family.
Easy indoctrination
Children have been used by militants across Africa because they are easier to indoctrinate than adults and easier to care for. They also make up the bulk of the Somali population — more than half the country’s estimated 7.5 million residents are under 18.
One al-Shabab fighter, Abuhamza Abul-kadir, admitted the movement used schoolchildren as child fighters but said they were volunteers.
“We have many young fighters, I do not want to give a figure,” Abul-kadir said.
“Some of them are as young as 13, but we never force them to join us. They are driven by their own will for the ongoing jihad (holy war).”
The Islamist militia is not the only group with child fighters. The government-allied militia Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama uses child fighters.
“The government also has under-18 soldiers,” said a senior ranking army officer Col Ahmed Aden Dhayow.
Mohamed Ahmed Ali, a 14-year-old recruit from the government-allied militia, said he chose to join after his religious teacher urged him. His clansmen consider boys of his age as adults, he shared, adding that there were hundreds of boys who were recruited — including some who were as young as 10.
“Our Quranic teacher asked us to take up arms against al-Shabab and we accepted his plea,” said Ali from Dusamareb. “It is an Islamic duty to fight these misled fighters (al-Shahab) with distorted ideologies.”
The teen said he’d like to continue his studies, but that “education comes only when we finish off al-Shabab”.
Source:AP