Omar Khadr's tragic story mostly about child abuse

[struggle4progress]

Paula Simons, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Saturday, June 30, 2007

~snip~ When American forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the rest of the Khadr family evacuated, leaving Omar behind with Taliban fighters. He had just celebrated his 15th birthday.

n July 2002, young Omar was one of five Taliban fighters holed up in a small compound in the village of Ab Khail in eastern Afghanistan. An American patrol, acting on a tip, raided the compound. The Taliban fought back fiercely. The battle went on for 41/2 hours, and only ended when two attack helicopters and four fighter planes arrived to launch intense air strikes, complete with rockets and 250-kilogram bombs. When a small group of American soldiers went in to look for bodies, the wounded Khadr, who was hiding behind a pile of rubble, allegedly threw a grenade, which fatally wounded a U.S. medic, Sgt. Chris Speer. ~snip~

He was a child soldier -- abused and abandoned by his family, bombed, shot and imprisoned by the Americans, then virtually disavowed by the country of his birth. ~snip~

It's tragic that Speer, a young medic, died in battle. But deaths are a bitter reality in any war. Throwing a grenade at a uniformed enemy in the midst of a firefight is neither a war crime nor a murder. ~snip~

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/columnists/story.html?id=e73f79db-4c27-44a6-b2b2-fc3c07cdcad5&p=1