Caution: Children at War

Abstract

There is no moral excuse for sending children into battle, but the dark reality is that this terrible practice is a regular feature of modern warfare. Some 300,000 children under the age of 18 (both boys and girls are now combatants, fighting in approximately 75 percent of the world's conflicts.(2) Among Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's human-rights violations was his policy of recruiting children into Iraq's armed forces, in clear violation of international law and moral norms.(3) Already, U.S. and allied forces have faced child soldiers in the fighting around Karbala and Nasariyah.(4) Since the mid-1990s, thousands of Iraqi boys have attended military-style summer boot camps. During the 3-week-long sessions, boys as young as 10 years old went through drills, learned the use of small arms, and received heavy doses of Ba'ath political indoctrination. The camps were named after resonating current events to help galvanize recruitment and add to the political effect. For example, the 2001 summer camp series was titled the Al Aqsa lntifada, to link it with the symbology of the Palestinian uprising that started earlier that year.(5) Beginning in 1998, the military ditched a series of training and military preparedness programs toward the entire Iraqi population, including boys as young as 15. The preparedness sessions, which generally ran for 2 hours a day over 40 days, mandated drilling and training on small arms.