The title itself, as you can see, makes Tim Arango's article a very appealing one to read. Not that it seems entertaining, but that it contains and empathetic persuasion to it, making people(at least those who have a heart) more likely to read through the article. The article is about a Syrian 14-year-old boy, Usaid Barho, who surrendered to Shiite guards after having volunteered to be a suicide bomber for the Sunnis.
[*side note: As the vast majority of the world knows, Sunnis and Shiites do not get along well...at all. Years of wars between the two major religious Muslim divisions have passed by, and it can be well inferred that there will be even more wars between them.]
Usaid Barho told the Shiite guards that the caliphate (aka- Sunnis) had seduced him into becoming one of them and brainwashed him along with several others into believing that Shiites were terrible people and deserved to die. The caliphate went as far as threatening his mother, saying that if the Shiites were not killed, they would come after his mother and rape her. Usaid then said that he was located to Iraq (home of the major Sunnis and Shiites). When he got there, he realized that what he was doing was wrong, so he quickly volunteered to be a suicide bomber so he could surrender to security forces. The boy later on told officers the real motives of his surrender- he had seen Sunnis brainwashing children, he had seen the hypocrisy and the lies that the Sunni leaders made- and he knew that all of it was wrong, which was why he decided to give up on caliphate desires, and surrender to the Shiites instead. The author then wraps up his article by saying that Usaid Barho plans on moving to Turkey to study, but cannot meet his family yet, and that nobody knows what Barho and his family's fate will be.
Tim Arango surely picked a somewhat touchy subject to write his article on. Suicide bombings in the Middle East have been trending on news these past few years, and many of us have seen numerous of innocent people dying because of them. The majority of the article is summarizing the happenings of Usaid Barho before, during and after his surrender to the Shiite guards. There are only a few paragraphs where the author inputs external information as a supplement to readers, and he never voices his opinion. The author probably chose to make his article an unbiased one because the subject in hand is not one that everyone can have a "valid" opinion on. The article shows an appeal to pathos, or emotions, through the words and concepts that Tim Arango chose to write about. By talking about Usaid Barho's family and their unknown fate, the author leaves us readers with a tingle on our spines and empathy towards Usaid. The chronological order of the story and the supplements inputed by the author makes the article flow readily and makes it easy for readers to understand the situation and the solution to the whole story of the Syrian boy. Overall, the author did a good job making his article both an informative and a sentimental one- delivering immediate messages about Sunnis and Shiites to readers and telling the story of a boy who discovered what the problem truly was.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/world/middleeast/syria-isis-recruits-teenagers-as-suicide-bombers.html?_r=0
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