Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Never mind that Soviet troops left Afghanistan long ago. The mujahedin are now fighting other Afghans and even one another, but the curriculum has not kept up. To schoolboys, "Russians" remains an indelible synonym for enemy...
...Salvadoran army has forcibly conscripted boys not yet 18, while soldiers as young as 13 have sworn allegiance to Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. But most child warriors belong to rebel groups, where how much they fight depends on how desperately their services are needed. The mujahedin of Afghanistan have boys as young as + nine battling Kabul. In Burma twelve-year-olds are recruited by the Karen rebels to defend their jungle territory. In El Salvador the F.M.L.N. is an equal-opportunity guerrilla group, one of the few to allow young girls to bear arms alongside the boys...
...Afghanistan all boys are urged to fight, even by their parents. Death on the battlefield is not just an honor, it is also the Muslim's guarantee of eternal life. In Burma, where Karen rebels have been fighting for independence for 41 years, combat has become the family business. Northern Ireland is not officially at war, but a state of siege between two religions has made violence the expected. As Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychologist, dryly says, "It's the children who don't throw stones that are abnormal...
...police. Gang violence is combat stripped of all the familiar rationales. It is the closest thing the U.S. has to battle within its borders, and many of the children emerge from the streets of Los Angeles more psychologically scarred than the young mujahedin who patrol the mountain passes of Afghanistan...
Whatever the full extent of Islamabad's involvement, it is clear that members of rebel groups like the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front cross the border from India, sometimes under covering fire from Pakistani troops, buy weapons in Pakistan's open arms markets, seek military training with the mujahedin in Afghanistan and return to Kashmir to fight on. India, doing its best to seal off the uprising, has increased its paramilitary forces in the region from...