America's 8-year old Yemini spy

Very interesting, and at the same time, a very sad tale.  How much truth in it?  I fear there must be more truth in this than we will choose to believe. **sigh**

Gregory D.Johnsen writing at TheAtlanticMag:
....Barq was one of the unorphaned street children
of Bayt al-Ahmar, Qadhi’s village. Barq had a mother and a father, but they lived back in Sanaa with his five brothers and sisters. His father was an enlisted man in Yemen’s Republican Guard whose salary wasn’t nearly enough to put food on the table for all of them.

How Barq came to be living as a street child isn’t entirely clear, but local residents say he first arrived in the village in 2011, after a wealthy member of his extended clan married into a prominent Bayt al-Ahmar family. The practice of sending children to stay with a more affluent branch of their extended family is common in Yemen, where poverty forces many families to make difficult decisions. But Barq’s family members evidently declined to take him in, and he ended up living on the street.

Stranded between a father in Sanaa who couldn’t provide for him and a clan in Bayt al-Ahmar that didn’t seem to want him, Barq made do as best he could in the hamlet. Villagers say that during the day he wandered dusty side roads looking for plastic bottles and other bits of trash that he could sell. At night he took shelter where he could find it. Sometimes villagers would give him some food, or offer him a night inside. One of these villagers was Adnan al-Qadhi, who, according to local tribesmen, took pity on the dirty little boy. After a few months, Qadhi invited Barq into his home. He gave the boy a place to sleep and treated him like one of his own five children, feeding him and helping to finance his education..........