Armed & underage: thousands of children are being forced to serve as soldiers around the world. And in the African nation of Somalia, the U.S. might even be helping pay their salaries.

• Author: Gettleman, Jeffrey
• Position: Cover story

Prowling the streets of Mogadishu, the shattered capital of Somalia, Awil Salah Osman looks like all the other boys with torn-up clothes, thin limbs, and eyes eager for attention.

But 12-year-old Awil is different in two ways: He is shouldering an automatic, fully loaded rifle; and he is working for a military that is substantially armed and financed by the United States.

It is well-known that Somalia's radical Islamist insurgents are plucking children off soccer fields and turning them into fighters, just as rebel groups in a number of African countries and elsewhere in the world do.

But Awil is not a rebel. He is working for Somalia's government. The U.S. and other Western nations support the fragile Somali regime, which is battling an Islamic insurgency, as part of the counter-terrorism strategy for the region.

According to human-rights groups and the United Nations, the Somali government is using hundreds of children, some as young as 9, on the front lines.

While the number of conflicts involving child soldiers has dropped since 2004 from 27 to 15, human-rights experts estimate that more than 200,000 children worldwide are still being used as combatants, usually against their will. And it isn't just boys: Girls are often pressed into duty as cooks or messengers. Many are subjected to sexual abuse, including rape.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, a human-rights group based in London, defines a child soldier as anyone under the age of 18 who is a member of government armed forces or any other armed group. (The U.S. allows voluntary military enlistment with parental consent at age 17.)

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In much of the world, particularly in unstable countries, when conflict breaks out, children are quickly swept up (see map, pages 8-9).

The Perfect Weapon

In some countries, hunger and poverty drive parents to sell their children into service. What's more, children are often considered the perfect weapon: They are easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless, and, most important, in endless supply.

"Child soldiers are ideal," a military commander from the African nation of Chad told Human Rights Watch. "They don't complain, they don't expect to be paid--and if you tell them to kill, they kill."

The use of child soldiers is "widespread and very persistent," says Lucia Withers of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

It's not a new problem. The Germans drafted adolescents when they got desperate toward the end of World War II. So did Iran, which used boys as young as 12 to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

Today, the Asian nation of Myanmar (also known as Burma) has one of the world's highest rates of child-soldier recruitment. Thousands of boys, some as young as 10, are purchased, kidnapped, or terrorized into joining the country's army.

In Colombia, approximately 8,000 children are fighting in armed rebel groups battling the...