The perfect weapon: thousands of child soldiers have been forced into battle in some of Africa's most violent conflicts.

• Author: Gettleman, Jeffrey
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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When he was 13 years old, Ishmael Beah was given an AK-47, ' drugged up, and taught to kill. It was 1993, and his native country, Sierra Leone, was in the midst of a civil war. Rebel soldiers had attacked his village and Beah was separated from his parents. After spending months fleeing danger and wandering through his war-torn country, he was forcibly recruited into the Sierra Leone army.

"I shot at everything that moved," Beah recalls of the two years he spent fighting rebel forces.

Now 26 and living in New York City, Beah is one of the lucky few to have escaped.

At 15, he was rescued by UNICEF workers and sent to a rehabilitation clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. Two years later, after a difficult recovery from drug addiction and trauma, he came to the United States, went to the United Nations International School in New York, and then graduated in 2004 from Oberlin College in Ohio.

Now, he's the best-selling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a chilling first-person account of his life as a child soldier.

EASILY MANIPULATED

All around the world, from Sri Lanka and Colombia to Afghanistan and Uganda, children like Beah are being swept into armed conflict, robbed of their childhoods, and used to fight for greed and power.

To rebel commanders, children are the perfect weapon: easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless, and, most important, in endless supply.

Today, according to human rights groups, there are some 300,000 child soldiers (defined as under 18) worldwide. Experts say the problem is deepening as the nature of conflict itself changes, especially in Africa.

Africa didn't invent the modern underage soldier. The Germans drafted adolescents when they got desperate during World War II. So did Iran, which used boys as young as 12 to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Young people have fought in religion-driven or nationalistic conflicts in Kosovo (a largely Albanian breakaway province of Serbia), Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where children have been sent into Israel as suicide bombers.

GREED & POWER

In Africa, however, the problem is especially severe: In one country after another, conflicts have morphed from cause-driven struggles--like ending colonial rule--to criminal drives led by warlords whose goals are plunder, greed, and power.

"There might have been a little rhetoric at the beginning," says Beah. "But very...