Andrea Mazzarino, How War Targets the Young

By Dilip -
America’s forever wars and their fallout over these last 18 years have been hell for kids. Just ask Ismail or any of the other 56 wounded children who survived an August 2018 attack on their school bus in northern Yemen by Saudi planes armed with American weaponry. Of course, you can’t ask the perhaps 40 children who died, thanks to a single 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin. And that was just one example of the way, in these years, war has torn the lives of children apart across the Greater Middle East.

Take, for example, Iraqi children in a country remade (more accurately, devastated) by the U.S. invasion of 2003 and everything that followed from it, including the ISIS takeover of major Iraqi cities in 2014. By 2016, UNICEF reported that “one in every five children in Iraq is at serious risk of death, injury, sexual violence, and recruitment into armed groups.” That was 3.6 million children (a jump of 1.3 million in 18 months). And if you make your focus larger still, UNICEF recently reported that, thanks to largely war-induced humanitarian crises across the Middle East and northern Africa, 32 million children need assistance, 5.8 million of whom are refugees....
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176643/tomgram%3A_andrea_mazzarino%2C_how_war_targets_the_young/

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