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Little Girl Soldiers: Child Fighters in Liberia

Thursday, April 29, 2004
By Gene Brooks, Samaritan's Purse Country Director in Liberia
Special to ASSIST News Service

MONROVIA, LIBERIA (ANS) -- Think of a hardened mercenary soldier, the participant in numerous atrocities of war. Now imagine that brutal warrior as a thirteen-year-old girl. It has been common in the West African nation of Liberia the last fourteen years of their bloody civil war.

One of the many tragedies of the fourteen year Liberian civil war has been child soldiers, even female child soldiers, little girls as young as four involved in fighting forces on all sides of this bitter conflict.

How does a little girl become associated with armed forces? Some are kidnapped when rebel groups surround their school and do “recruiting.” Some are captured in nighttime village raids when all the men are slaughtered and all the females, regardless of age, are gang raped. Some simply join the fighters as cooks or “wives” of commanding officers. Some voluntarily take up arms because the opposing side killed a family member.

Whatever the reason, the West African wars of the past twenty-five years have increasingly used children as frontline fighters. In Liberia, as many as two of every five fighters (40%) are children.

Because of the atrocities they have experienced, child fighters have great potential for brutality themselves. Indeed, former president Charles Taylor’s elite troops were children under arms, many of whom were initiated by being forced to execute their mothers.

Samaritan's Purse, in cooperation with the United Nations Mission in Liberia and UNICEF, is operating three homes for girls of the fighting forces, to rehabilitate and reintegrate them into a peace-time society, a brave new world most of them have never known.

Most of all, these young women need to know that true Peace is a Person. They need the emotional and spiritual healing that can only come through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Pray with us that these girls will be nurtured and brought to understand the healing understand the healing of a personal relationship with Jesus of Nazareth.

ASSIST News Service (ANS) - PO Box 2126, Garden Grove, CA 92842-2126 USA
E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com, Web Site: www.assistnews.net

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