Word: rebels
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That is, of course, a real possibility in a rebellion as bloody as this one. Aspiring to succeed Doe is Charles McArthur Taylor, a former Liberian official who led about 150 guerrillas across the border from the Ivory Coast last Christmas Eve. Recruits flocked to the rebel ranks after the army, headed by members of Doe's minority Krahn tribe, staged a series of reprisal attacks on the villages of the Gio and Mano tribes in Taylor's base area...
...Nations has estimated that 200,000 children under the age of 15 are bearing arms around the 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...
...among the men, wearing the same uniform, carrying the same 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...
Ehtablay, the Karen rebel, and Ducc, the Los Angeles gang member, have nothing in common except their age, and the intoxication and empowerment that came when they first fired a gun. Young boys, be they in Burma or Afghanistan or Northern Ireland or Los Angeles, are drawn to the violence; even the fear, when it distills into adrenaline, carries illicit pleasure. What sets Los Angeles apart from Afghanistan, Burma and Northern Ireland is that gang warfare, with its spoils of drug money, gratifies greed. Money in South Central is the gang warrior's jihad -- a fitting retribution for a materialistic...
Monrovia is fast becoming a lonely place. As the rebel National Patriotic Front advanced to within 20 miles of the capital last week, frightened residents fled to neighboring Sierra Leone. Many embassy staffers have departed, and high officials of President Samuel Doe's government have left town. Even Doe's wife and children have escaped to Britain...