Imagine a young fourteen year old girl sitting in an abandoned apartment complex with four adult men. Her clothes are torn and dirty, her hair and body haven’t been washed for months. She kneels on the ground looking at a bomb made from a few wires, a small digital timer and some tightly packed C4 explosives all wrapped together with duct tape. If this young girl doesn’t attach this bomb to her chest and walk out the complex with it, the men will kill her.
The violence that citizens hear about in the Middle East wages on every day. People are dying, problems aren’t being solved (some of those problems being the reason the United States is there in the first place).
When an individual thinks of a war, the first thought that usually comes to mind is adults firing automatic machine guns at each other from trenches or from behind the cover of a car somewhere in the desert. But the key word used in that image is “adult”. No longer is war only concerning adults, children and teenagers are now tossed into the mix.
A teenager ranging from the ages of 13-16 are in most cases physically capable of more than that of an adult from the ages of 30-45. With that in mind, a small teenage girl can get from point A to point B with a bomb on her body a lot faster than a 40 year old man can. Teenagers can also fit into places that a lot of fully grown men cannot. For instance; if an explosive device is attached to a small boy and must be detonated within the time limit given on the timer at a busy intersection lying half a mile away. The boy will most likely have to take some alley ways and backdoors, how many parents and adults can do that?
But what is being done to solve these atrosities? Why are teenagers even being allowed to kill at such a young age?
According to the Human Rights Watch website (hrw.org), Senator Richard Durbin introduced the Child Soldiers Prevention Act which restricts financing, training and weapon transfers to countries and armies which recruit child soldiers.
There are currently ten governments which recruit child soldiers worldwide, nine of those ten governments recieve military assistance from the United States.
Also, National Public Radtio (npr.org) states that there were eight recorded female suicide bombings in 2007. That 8 females has grown to 14 in as little as two years, similar to the trend of using child soldiers.
Farhana Ali who is an international analyst with Rand Corp. simply defines these female bombings as “a new trend” which is reported on the NPR website.
In an interview stated on the NPR website, an Iraqi woman named Um al Harith says that “The guards just stare when a woman walks past, and they never search women.”