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Photo: The Asian American Trafficking Outreach Project

For boys released from the army after being illegally recruited, access to education, jobs and social protection will be difficult

Dressed in white shirts over their green sarongs, dozens of young men poured down the concrete step of the army barracks and across the compound. With parents in tow, they walked towards a line of buses parked beyond the barbed-wire perimeter. Once everyone was seated, the buses moved off. The young men stared out of darkened windows; some looked blank while others, smiling, waved at the grey slab buildings as they receded into the distance.

Recruited illegally as children, the 108 boys were returning home to their families after being formally discharged from the Burmese military. Some had come straight from active service, while others had emerged from hiding or been released from prison, where they were jailed for desertion.

Photo: Vanguardia

Colombia’s army has acknowledged that forcing youths into trucks on the pretext of checking their military status is against the law, newspaper El Espectador reported on Thursday.

In late August, after allegations made ​​in the media about arbitrary raids for recruitment purposes by the Army, better known as “batidas”, the then Head of Army Recruiting General Felix Ivan Muñoz was relieved of his duties. Colonel Mauricio Martinez was confirmed as the replacement and now has the role of promoting “the improvement of processes for defining the military situation of Colombian men.”

This is a recurring issue. The Colombian military has in the past been accused of forced and irregular recruitment of young people and citizens exempt from military service.

These “illegal raids” are carried out in cities where army trucks illegally and forcibly pick up young men on the pretext of checking their military status.

Photo: Syria Deeply

A new law stipulates that young men in the cantons of Kobani, Ifrin and Al Jazeera must enlist. Now, some have begun to flee.

When 29-year-old Bassam defected from the Syrian army he thought he had escaped mandatory military service for good. The law school student fled to Iraqi Kurdistan in early 2012, then to the neighboring Syrian city of Qamishli.

But the draft followed him. On July 13 the militant arm of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which exerts civil control over Kurdish-majority areas of the northeast, introduced a bill that would force Bassam to join the Kurdish armed forces.

Photo: The 2013 Caiman MRAP acquired by the San Diego Unified School District Police Department with decals rendered by an artist. San Diego Unified School District

Update, Sept. 18, 10:54 a.m.: Following complaints, the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department announced Tuesday it will return three grenade launchers but keep an anti-mine armored vehicle and 61 M-16s it acquired through a Department of Defense program. The surplus automatic M-16 rifles were converted to semi-automatic, the department said.