Category World News

In India, thousands of people are protesting new business and government policies.

Marta last saw her 14-year-old son three months ago when he marched down the street with the other children’s soldiers while wearing rebel army fatigues and a rifle.

She pleaded with the commander’s release of her 13-year-old boy, who had been abducted nine months earlier in the middle of the night from their home in eastern Colombia. The officer waved her away and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t leave the dissident branch of the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

“I only pray and cry and cry and pray and ask God to remove my boy from there,” Marta said, who requested anonymity so she could share the story with her family safely.

The mother, who is 40, is not the only one. Similar armed groups have abused hundreds of Colombian mothers who have lost children through coercion or abduction.

Colombia’s worst humanitarian situation has been described in the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) annual report for 2024 since the FARC rebel group’s 2016 peace deal. It attracted particular attention because it revealed that 58% of people in conflict zones cited it as their community’s highest risk, a finding that attracted particular attention.

Criminal organizations increasingly rely on underage soldiers to bolster their ranks as Colombia’s long-running and complex conflicts continue to escalate, with numerous ceasefires and dialogues between the state and armed groups collapsing this year.

And little is being done to stop them.

After the armed group made a clear threat to the authorities when they took her son, Marta said she is too afraid to report it to them. They will execute him and then drive away for the rest of the family.

He needs to be, I tell him. I keep telling myself that everything is in God’s hands so that I don’t put my other children in danger, Marta said. I don’t eat or sleep. I sometimes feel like I have no desire to act, but I also have three smaller kids. And they require me.

Gloria, a 52-year-old mother from eastern Colombia who also requested anonymity, shared a story that resembles Marta’s. Her 16-year-old son was kidnapped in the middle of the night and forced to join a different armed group in June.

She said, “I’m desperate and unsure of what to do.”

After a distressed family member called Gloria, she learned about her son’s abduction. They claimed that her son’s rebel fighters had forcibly entered and taken him away from the house.

She claimed that the boy had never even touched a gun, and that they had recruited him to fight. He says, “He is doing nothing because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” We never had any weapons at home.

In the wake of fierce fighting between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissidents of the now-demobilized FARC, her family fled their rural hamlet in eastern Colombia earlier this year.

They found it difficult to make ends meet once they arrived at a refugee shelter in the nearby city.

Her son returned to their family home after unsuccessful attempts to find employment in Bogota and unable to join his mother at the shelter due to space constraints.

He had to return to our hometown, where he was forcefully taken, Gloria said.

Gloria’s son was brought back home in late June after intensive negotiations with local community members and the ICRC, unlike Marta.

Officially documented child recruitments increased by 1, 000% between 2021 and 2024, from 37 to 409, but the International Crisis Group (ICG) predict that the actual number will be much higher.

According to Elizabeth Dickinson, senior Colombia analyst at ICG, “we’re seeing a generation of children lost into these networks of criminality for whom they bear little significance.”

In a recent report, she described Colombia’s child recruitment problem. It found that minors are frequently provided with the least amount of fundamental instruction before being deployed on the front lines and used as cannon fodder to protect higher ranks.

According to Dickinson, “children have suffered a lot of casualties in combat over the past year.”

Since monitoring organizations do not distinguish between child soldier and civilian deaths when it comes to children, it is difficult to estimate how many children are killed each year.

However, at least 14 of the 262 children recruited in 2023 were killed, according to the 2024 UN Secretary-General’s Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict, despite rights activists’ claims that this figure is much higher.

The majority of those children are still associated (136), and 14 of them were killed. 112 of those children were released or escaped. According to the report, “some 38 kids were recruited into combat roles,” according to which two children were recruited by various armed groups on separate occasions.

According to the report, 186 children were recruited by the National Liberation Army (ELN), 41 by the National Liberation Army (ELN), and 22 by the Gulf Clan (also known as Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia).

The Colombian Family Welfare Institute reported that 213 children who were previously associated with armed organizations had enrolled in its protection program.

Families who lose children to recruitment deal with agonizing pain because they worry that their child may pass away or be hurt.

by coercion or force

Although forced recruitment is far too prevalent, according to Dickinson of the ICG, minors “voluntarily” enlist in the fight in the majority of cases.

We’re talking about armed and criminal organizations winding a fantastical tale to these children so badly that they leave on their own volition, Dickinson said.

According to Dickinson, groups sell a glitzy image of life in arms using TikTok, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Videos of flashy motorcycles, weapons, and money are used to target boys. Young girls are drawn to them by the armed groups, who lure them with schemas of romance, empowerment, education, and, in some cases, even cosmetic surgery.

However, children are used by senior-ranking members to do their dirty work after enlisting in a completely different reality. Minors are tasked with dismembering bodies or for days on end patrolling remote jungle areas when they are more pliable. Child sexual abuse is also a common occurrence.

According to Hilda Molano, coordinator of the Coalition Against the Involvement of Children and Young People in Colombia (COALICO), “all child recruitment is forced even if it wasn’t done using force or through coercion.”

COALICO assists in the compilation of official information on the phenomenon and offers assistance to families and children who have been impacted by recruitment. More than 10% of the cases, according to Molano, are likely not officially registered and verified.

She claimed that since 2009, when the ravaged FARC rebels sought to recoup lost labor, there has been no child recruitment.

According to Molano, “it is a cultural problem that transcends the boy and the girl of today,” Molano cited decades-long conflict in Colombia.

The COALICO coordinator described the normalization of violence and the acceptance of illegal behavior as a means of escaping poverty. Youth in Colombia often believe that joining an armed group is the only way to improve their quality of life and become more independent.

Young people in Colombia don’t have many spaces where they can express themselves and feel heard, Dickinson said.

Experts warn that stopping it is a mammoth task that would include addressing poverty, armed conflict, and cultural norms given that child recruitment is rising.

“We can’t save everyone,” he said. It’s a depressing reality, Molano said.

Molano believes that protecting children must begin at the local level, despite the fact that she has not stopped herself from battling recruitment whenever she can.

“Daily support is the solution, in the case-by-case, because otherwise, it is irrelevant. We become lost in society, Molano said.

As with Marta, who is still hopeful that her son will return, hundreds of mothers across the nation are still subject to the control of armed groups, praying for their children to be happy and well once more.

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Tuesday that it was scrapping a policy requiring people to take off their shoes while passing through airport screenings.

The policy, long a source of ire for travellers, had its roots in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, when authorities sought to bolster security around air travel through a host of measures.

Many more rules have been added in the time since, some criticised as arbitrary and needlessly intrusive, and have been supplemented by the integration of measures such as facial scanning technology at airports across the country.

What’s behind the change, what rules remain, and could other policies change next?

STARS, STRIPES, AND SHOES ON! 🇺🇸👟

Under the leadership of @Sec_Noem, DHS is announcing a new policy today which will allow passengers traveling through domestic airports to keep their shoes on through security screening at TSA checkpoints.

This policy change will drastically… pic.twitter.com/clyk46RXvI

What was the ‘shoes off’ policy?

The “shoes off” policy was first implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in 2006 and required travellers to remove their shoes as they advanced through airport security screenings to check them for possible explosives.

Those enrolled in TSA PreCheck, a programme in which people who pass a basic security check are allowed to bypass certain airport security measures, had already been allowed to pass through screenings with their shoes on.

Why was it implemented?

The policy was the result of a failed December 2001 attack by a British man named Richard Reid, who packed explosives into his shoes and tried to detonate them during a flight from Paris to Miami.

The incident, like many attempted attacks carried out in the post-9/11 period, was highly amateur: Reid, a petty criminal who became an Islamic fundamentalist, was foiled after an airline worker noticed that he was trying to light his shoe on fire with a match.

But the failed attack played into fears that were prominent during the post-9/11 era. And, when it came to safety, why take a chance?

“TSA can’t just rely on the next attack being as incompetent as this one was,” Jay Stanley, a privacy advocate and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Al Jazeera.

The agency asked people, on a voluntary basis, to consider removing their shoes while passing through screening so they could be checked for explosives. TSA later made the policy mandatory in August 2006.

Why was the policy scrapped?

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement on Tuesday that eliminating the policy would remove a source of strain on travellers and reduce TSA wait times at airports, and was no longer necessary due to technological innovations.

“We expect this change will drastically decrease passenger wait times at our TSA checkpoints, leading to a more pleasant and efficient passenger experience,” she said.

The change was effective immediately.

What other policies remain in place, and could they change?

While the “no shoes” policy is gone, travellers expecting an easy, stress-free trip to the airport should temper their expectations as many other security measures remain in place.

Passengers will, for example, still have to remove their belts, coats, laptops, and certain items from their bags while passing through security. Rules limiting gels and liquids in carry-on items to 3.4 ounces (100 ml) still apply, and checked bags must also be subjected to X-ray screenings.

Canines used for detecting bombs and drugs are still frequently used, and full-body scanners were brought to airports after another failed attack in December 2009, in which a man tried to detonate explosives smuggled onto a plane in his underwear.

Noem has suggested that DHS is reviewing some rules, but did not offer further details.

Are those measures effective or just security theatre?

Travellers have long fumed about an ever-growing list of measures that can seem arbitrary and do not always have a clear utility.

While the government argues that the increases in airport security reflect efforts to patch up vulnerabilities exposed by the 9/11 hijackers and subsequent failed attacks, some experts say that certain measures provide the impression of security more than provable benefits.

“People are hesitant to push back against new rules because nobody wants to be seen as responsible if there’s another attack,” said Stanley.

“Security theatre has always been a part of this, where you make a big show of security in order to give people the impression of greater safety.”

But enforcing so many rules can be difficult for agency workers themselves, who have the industrial-scale task of screening around two million travellers per day.

A 2015 report from the agency’s inspector general found that TSA officers had failed to detect weapons, explosives and other prohibited items brought through security by undercover agents to test the effectiveness of the system in 95 percent of cases.

Despite such concerns, TSA has continued to grow in size and scope each year. The agency has a workforce of nearly 63,000 people and a budget that is set to reach more than $11bn in 2025. In 2006, when “shoes off” was first implemented, it was around $6bn.

What new technologies are being used in airport security?

In her statement, Noem said that one of the reasons that the “shoes off” policy could be safely discarded is that “cutting-edge technological advancements” have rendered it unnecessary.

One that travellers may have noticed is the greater use of facial recognition technology, a development some privacy advocates have viewed with concern.

What are the privacy concerns?

Petra Molnar, a lawyer and author of the book, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, told Al Jazeera that in an era of heightening restrictions on movement, airports have become testing grounds for new technologies, with civil liberties a largely secondary concern.

“With increasingly more digital technologies used at borders, airports have become epicentres of surveillance tech, with facial recognition and biometric technologies augmenting to physical surveillance practices,” said Molnar.

“Airports and borders are often one of the first places where new surveillance technologies are tested out, often with little regulation and oversight. Airports are the true testing grounds where unregulated technology experiments can run unchecked.”

While the decision to scrap the “shoes off” policy is a rare example of airport security measures being dialed back in the name of efficiency and convenience, it also comes at a time when those traveling or returning to the US are increasingly wary of being pulled aside and questioned about their political views on topics such as Israel’s war in Gaza.

The administration of President Donald Trump recently warned, for example, that international students entering the US must make their social media profiles available for inspection by authorities.

William Ruto, president of Kenya, advised that anyone who looted or vandalized a business be shot in the leg and dealt with by the courts afterward. Following the anti-government demonstrations on Monday that attracted at least 31 people and caused his first comments.