Spoils of war
Crouching in the bush, an AK-47 machine gun poised at the ready, an African boy is a portrait of icy detachment as he considers an interloper. It’s the now-hardened image that has come to symbolize the recruitment of children into armed conflicts since the 1990s. Experts say that outdated and narrow picture obscures present-day conditions, where both boys and girls are deployed in war not just in Africa, but also Asia, Latin America, and now Syria, where civil war has raged since 2011. While global pressure to curb the use of children in combat has worked in some places, the persistent challenge for local governments and international organizations such as the United Nations is to find ways to integrate damaged former soldiers back into the communities they were led to violate and abandon. Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone and the author of “A Long Way Home: Memoirs of...