*** By Gabriel Gatehouse BBC News, Iraq We stopped again. Follow in our tracks exactly, Ali shouted as he turned his pickup round again. Why? I asked. Landmines, someone shouted back. We eventually made it onto a tarmacked road and into Amerli. The people of the town looked like they had been subsisting on pure adrenaline for the past two-and-a-half months. They lined the streets in small groups, men and women, young and old alike, waving Shia flags and cheering as our little convoy progressed along the main street into town. ..... Two young boys were pushed forward through the crowd. Abdallah and Abdelhadi, aged 10 and 12, stumbled forward. Each was clutching a Kalashnikov rifle. My nephews - these are the heroes of the siege, Ali beamed. At first I was inclined not to take that literally. Surely I thought, they hadnt sent 10-year-olds out to fight against IS, a group so brutal, so fearsome that the Iraqi army, trained and equipped by the Americans at a cost of billions of dollars, had turned and run rather than stand and fight? But the townspeople of Amerli insisted it was true. They were under siege, they said, not only by the invading forces of IS, but also by the people of the surrounding Sunni villages. They needed every last fighter. For the people caught up in this desperate war, the sight of a young child brandishing the planets most widely used instrument of death has become a thing not of horror but of pride. ***
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 19:19:30 +0000
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