Tag: war

 Source: CNN.com

When he was a little boy in Sudan, singer Emmanuel Jal's mother was killed. Soldiers raped his sister. At the age of 9, filled with longings for revenge, he became a child soldier.

"I had a lot of hatred, I had a lot of bitterness," he says.

But despite his beyond-brutal background, the dreadlocked Jal is gentle, almost shy. He's tall and skinny with a blinding smile.

As one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, he has traveled a road of pain many people cannot imagine, survived against all odds and come back to become an artist, rapping about those experiences.

Source: CNN.com

 Five-year-old Youssif is scarred for life, his once beautiful smile turned into a grotesquely disfigured face -- the face of a horrifying act by masked men. They grabbed him on a January day outside his central Baghdad home, doused him with gas and set him ablaze.

It's an act incomprehensibly savage, even by Iraq's standards today. No one has been arrested and the motive remains unknown.