Sharif says he was 10 when his religious teacher led his class into a poor neighborhood of Somalia's capital 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, Sharif says, where Somali and foreign instructors showed them how to use weapons and set ambushes. The boy says 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 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 mildly 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, a Nairobi-based analyst at the International Crisis Group. "The sad reality with modern infantry weapons is that all you really need is a kid to operate them."
UNICEF, the section of the U.N. dealing with children's rights, said children as young as 9 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 are being systematically recruited and used in ever larger numbers for military and related purposes by all of the major combatant groups," she said. "The number of bases and camps used to train these children is commensurately widespread and appears to be growing."
An aid worker in Kenya tracking child recruitment says cases verified by their partner organizations in Somalia have risen from five in September to a high of 26 in January, when Somalia was awash with rumors 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 insecurity. Staff often reported seeing scores of children in camps but were only able to verify the details of one or two, she said. She asked for her name and her organization's name to be withheld to protect staff from retribution.
Human Rights Watch documented several cases of children fighting in militias in a report released last week. A mother said her 14- and 12-year-old sons 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.
Source: AP
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