According to US forces, Afghan resistance forces are getting younger.
Wild Wild Youth
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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With the recent event of a book published about soldiers operating in Afghanistan, an article claimed that a 16 y.o boy had allegedly forced to join militants/taleban/? for some money iirc.
Norwegian soldiers (who wrote the book) told about how they were engaging a group of people, and at one point a man who turned out to be young man, rose up to standing position and was shot dead by a sniper (from quite far off, outside regular firing range from what I understood).
The article did not bother to mention anything about the event itself, as to who shot first etc, and was imo a shoddy piece of journalism. This was another article that was associated with a book release. And I could not help thinking that the article worked to be some kind of advertisement.
More important than having an article about how “unfortunate” it is about killing 16 year olds, I think shooting dead harmless civilians at a checkpoint deserve critisism instead.
I noticed that I was unlear in the earlier post.
The 16 year old boy had allegedly been forced to become a recruit, and I believe they claimed that the militants/taleban/? had offered some payment in return for this.
Joe, it’s very common in Afghanistan for any man (and “men” start at 13) to be inducted into a Taliban fighting band for an indetermanate period and be paid a lump sum at the outset. Back in 2002, the Taliban were paying villagers to fire rockets on a US base and it was ten dollars a rocket. Very few of them hit the compound, but the point was to reinforce the idea that the Taliban were not going away.
One day that young kid will be like a “David” in the David/Goliath story, the kid will sling a rock and bring down a mighty warrior – in other words, some small country will slay a huge imperialistic nation.
Diz,
We can only hope right?