IT WAS JUST before dark, and Charles was pulling weeds with his father in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state when roughly a dozen armed rebels appeared, demanding he join their ranks. Charles was terrified. His father tried to intervene, but he was outnumbered. That night, Charles, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, was separated from his father and forced to become a soldier. He was just 13 years old.
It’s been three years since the beginning of South Sudan’s civil war, and the consequences have been devastating. Rebels and government forces have conscripted more than 17,000 children to fight, according to UNICEF, in a conflict between supporters of President Salva Kiir and those of former Vice President Riek Machar. The war has already killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced more than 3 million people. Both sides have been accused of killings and mass rapes, but a recent U.N. report placed most of the blame on the government’s side. The conflict has also been economically disastrous, creating inflation and now famine. In February, the U.N. said some 100,000 people are on the brink of starvation, while another million could be affected. Months earlier, Yasmin Sooka, the U.N.’s chair of the Commission on Human Rights in the country warned that South Sudan was showing “all of the warning signals” of a Rwanda-like genocide.
As the situation worsens, Kiir has resisted help from foreign countries by blocking humanitarian assistance and raising the cost of permits for international aid workers. This comes at a time when the United States appears to be turning inward. In mid-March, the White House directed the State Department and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to cut U.N. program budgets by almost half—cuts, according to Foreign Policy, that would disproportionately affect State Department funding to UNICEF and peacekeeping. Since 2014, the United States has given $2.1 billion in humanitarian aid to South Sudan. But as the Trump administration hashes out Washington’s new foreign policy, some fear that boys like Charles are running out of time.