OPINION:
Innocence, once lost, vanishes forever. Spoiling a child’s only opportunity to laugh and play without the cares of adulthood is a crime. Many children are swept into the violence their parents unleashed across the world, and the fortunate ones cheat death only to endure wasted childhood years and a joyless life.
Wasil Ahmad had the misfortune of coming into the world amid the tribalism of Afghanistan. Only 10 years old, Wasil chose a path of necessity when he took up arms against the Taliban. Insurgent fighters attacked his hometown in Oruzgan Province, wounding his uncle and 10 other members of the local police militia. Rendered fatherless in a previous assault, Wasil stepped in to lead the remaining forces in defense of the village. The boy fired rockets from a rooftop, helping to stop the attackers, then served as the group’s leader for 44 days until his uncle recovered. His heroism earned him accolades from local authorities. The enemy noticed, too. When Wasil left the militia and returned to his fourth grade schoolroom, Taliban gunmen assassinated him in his front yard.
The generational fighting in Afghanistan is tragic enough, but the toll such conflicts takes on children like Wasil makes it more so. The spike in Taliban offensives that induced President Obama to agree, reluctantly, to send several thousand U.S. soldiers back to the war-weary country has resulted in an accompanying increase in harm to children. In 2014, Afghanistan suffered 2,502 child casualties, including 710 killed, according to the United Nations. The account in The New York Times notes that the government criminalized the recruitment of children into security forces in February 2015, and it’s difficult for defenders of hearth and home to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules when the enemy doesn’t. Children who come of age on the battlefield and not the playground bear scars on their hearts that the passage of time cannot erase.
Few war zones can match the fury of the violence in Syria, where the dogs of war target children in particular. The U.N. logged 2,107 violations during 2014, and reported the establishment of three Islamic State training camps in Raqqa for child soldiers. Filthy money makes recruitment of the young easy. Child soldiers in Syria can earn $400 monthly — a strong incentive for impoverished parents to send their sons into the insurgency, particularly when radical Islamic terrorists celebrate them as national heroes. ISIS videos of boys dressed in military fatigues executing prisoners with guns and blades have soiled the Internet, attracting worldwide condemnation.
The U.N. has mounted a twitter campaign to stop the abuse. Prominent U.N. officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, are featured online holding signs reading, “#Children, not soldiers.” It brings to mind first lady Michelle Obama’s futile #Bring back our girls” hashtag crusade meant to pressure Nigeria’s Boko Haram to release nearly 300 schoolgirls taken captive in 2014. Most are still missing. Barbarians who press children into combat are oblivious to the decency of the international community.
Western multiculturalists preach the notion that all ethnicities are equally worthy of respect. But cultures that encourage their young to kill and be killed in the name of religious or ethnic chauvinism are exiles from a darker age. Child abuse of this kind is a guarantee that only tragedy and sorrow will follow into a sorrowful future for the young and innocent.
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