Word: mujahedin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...thighs and groin to his stomach, and the pink, raw flesh forms a vast inverted horseshoe two inches deep -- as if he had mounted a burning saddle that seared deep into his body. He was injured during an attack in a village called , Allishir, in the Khost province. The mujahedin were advancing, and the man next to Rahmat Hussain stepped on a mine. The man was blown to bits; when the doctors first treated Rahmat Hussain, they found a piece of the man's flesh lodged inside his wound. His father had died in battle a month before Rahmat Hussain...
...world. The 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...
...youths fighting one another and the 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...
...weapon, walking with the same tired swagger. It is from a distance that the reality of child soldiers appalls. Even people living close to the fighting find it easier to forget. Hamed Karzai, the urbane spokesman of the Afghan rebel government, spends most of his time mediating between rival mujahedin factions. Sipping tea in the Pakistan city of Peshawar, 40 miles from the Afghan border, he seems faintly amused at the notion of young boys fighting on the side of the rebels. He allows that there might be some children who take part in battle. "It is a game...