Word: mujahedin
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Islam Dara is a small mujahedin supply base nestled in jagged rocks beneath a circle of mountains, a desert oasis fed by a cold thin stream. Except for the sound of aerial bombing that burns red rings of brush fire above the enclave, Islam Dara seems sheltered. A few canvas tents are pitched amid boulders and mounds of ammunition: RPG-7s, launchers, bazookas. With its cool caves and grassy marshes harboring frogs, Islam Dara is a boy's paradise out of Kipling. But the dozen or so boys who stay there are living an idyll...
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...