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Lion of Babylon -> RE: COWARDS and SCUM! (8/28/2007 12:06:12 PM)
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Re-Educating Iraq's Child Insurgents
US Opens New Center for Hundreds of Children Detained During Surge
Inside classrooms surrounded by concertina wire, hundreds of Iraqi child fighters study reading, writing, math, and science, while the Americans detaining them hope they're also learning to like, or at least respect, their captors. The number of underage detainees held by the US has increased from 100 to 800 since March, according to a new report in the LA Times, and the US has just opened a new re-education facility for the young charges at Camp Cropper.
"We have quickly realized," said Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the commander of detainee operations, "that most of these young men are victims not only of Al Qaeda , but also of their own illiteracy. Because they couldn't read or write, they also couldn't work, and unemployed young men are also angry young men, susceptible to the cunning arguments of extremists."
Stone offers a number of reasons to explain the dramatic upswing in the number of young detainees since March, claiming that al Qaeda in Iraq may have turned to recruiting more children because the US has stemmed the flow of foreign fighters into the country, making adults volunteers harder to recruit. He also says US troops may simply be coming into contact with more children because of the troop build-up, or that parents are pushing their kids to take work for the insurgency because of the increasing poverty and desperation.
According to the LA Times:
Stone said some children have told interrogators that their parents encouraged them to do the militants' dirty work because the extremists have deep pockets. Insurgents typically pay the boys $200 to $300 to plant a bomb, enough to support a family for two or three months, say their Iraqi instructors at a U.S. rehabilitation center. About 85% of the child detainees are Sunni and the majority live in Sunni Arab-dominated regions in the country's west and north. In these deeply impoverished, violence-torn communities, the men with money and influence are the ones with the most powerful ****nals. These are the children's role models.
Stone said that at the newly-opened "House of Wisdom," the detainees will be instructed in reading, writing, science, mathematics, civics, history, given psychological counseling, and access to a library that will even have Arabic translations of Harry Potter. He did not, however, indicate when the detainees might be given access to a courtroom.
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