Our Child Soldiers in Libya

Ill-equipped teenagers members of the Libyan anti-Gadhafi rebels

DOUG SAUNDERS

TOBRUK, LIBYA— Globe and Mail

Ahmed Abdelrahmin is 15, but he is small for his age and his voice hasn’t changed. On Sunday, he sat patiently in the yard of a former high school in the east Libyan city of Tobruk as a Qatari instructor showed how to dismantle and clean a 50 mm anti-aircraft gun. Then he practised operating a battlefield radio set. In between, there was lots of marching.

Like all of the 350 young men around him, he volunteered to join the Libyan rebels, walking into their local headquarters with a uniform purchased by his father and a lunch packed by his mother. On Sunday, he was ready to complete a crash 30-day training program to prepare volunteers for the fight against Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s much more well-prepared army.

As Canada approaches its fifth month at war in Libya – participating in a multinational NATO air war to beat back Col. Gadhafi’s troops and protect the rebels – it is increasingly apparent how far this resistance movement has to go to become a fully capable army. While its political organization, headquartered in Benghazi, appears comparatively unified and purposeful, the combat operation is haphazard and woefully ill-supplied.

The scene inside the rebel camp on Sunday looked like a teen remake of The Dirty Dozen: A shambolic line of soldiers, many under 18 and at least three only 15, mixed with a scattering of older educated professionals of varying fitness, marched in haphazard order under the blazing sun, some wearing a mix of leftover, purchased or found uniforms, others in T-shirts and sneakers, with expressions of determined bravado. It was not so much West Point as Welcome Back, Kotter.

Yet this was graduation week. Equipped with pickup-truck rocket launchers jerry-built from Soviet aircraft parts and carrying battered AK-47 assault rifles, these young men, some barely able to tie their boots properly, will be sent to the front lines in Misrata and the hills of western Libya within 48 hours, where they will join the Tobruk branch of the Martyrs of the February 17 Revolution Brigade in its faltering push toward Tripoli.

Commanders say that very young boys like Mr. Abdelrahmin will not be sent to the front – combat is officially only for 18-year-olds, though ID checks are minimal – but instead will perform behind-the-lines duties in the mess hall or the communications office. Still, the rebels need all the bodies they can get.

Here at the training camp, meals are generally donated by the families of soldiers. Weapons are many decades old, none of them modern or accurate. Graduates are told that, as soldiers, they probably won’t be paid for at least a month and probably much longer, as the rebels currently have few sources of financing.

As a result, the anti-Gadhafi rebellion has not attracted anywhere close to all the fighting-age males in eastern Libya: Some of these young men said they know only a few friends who have been willing to fight.

The officers who run the training – a mix of soldiers donated by Qatar’s army and retired officers from Col. Gadhafi’s army who’ve joined the rebels – say they have compressed what is normally at least three months of basic training into 30 days.

“We’ve eliminated all the theoretical stuff – we just go straight into practical skills. We’ve made everything very short and very intense so they can survive in the battlefield,” says Altayib Al-Giryani, who oversees the training program.

Even this, he notes, is an improvement. In the early months, when the democracy protests against Col. Gadhafi turned into a fight for survival and then a mass armed movement to oust the dictator, the rebel army formed spontaneously, with young men hitchhiking to the front with little more than sunglasses and attitude.

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