The experts of the United Nations (UN) have disclosed in a report that nearly 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been killed in the battlefield during January 2020 and May 2021.
According to the UN report, Iranian-backed rebels continued to hold camps and courses encouraging youngsters to turn into militants.
The experts have submitted their report to the United Nations Security Council. According to report, the experts investigated some summer camps in schools and a mosque and noted that Houthis were disseminating their ideology and recruiting children to fight in the 7-year war with Yemen’s internationally recognised government, which is backed by a Saudi-led coalition.
Experts said the children are advised to shout the Houthi slogan ‘death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam,’ said the four-member panel of the UN experts in their report. This is horrible to know that in one camp, children as young as 7 years of age were trained to clean weapons and evade rockets.
The experts said they documented 10 cases where children were taken to fight after being told they would be enrolled in cultural courses or were already taking such courses, nine cases where humanitarian aid was provided or denied to families solely on the basis whether their children participated in fighting or to teachers on the basis of whether they taught the Houthi curriculum, and one case where sexual violence was committed against a child who underwent military training.
The panel said it received a list of 1,406 children recruited by the Houthis who died on the battlefield in 2020 and a list of 562 children recruited by the rebels who died on the battlefield between January and May 2021.
They were aged between 10 and 17 years old, the experts said, and a significant number of them were killed in Amran, Dhamar, Hajjah, Hodeida, Ibb, Saada and Sanaa.
Yemen has been engulfed in civil war since 2014 when the Houthis took Sanaa, the capital, and much of the northern part of the country, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates and was backed at the time by the United States, entered the war months later, in 2015, seeking to restore the government to power.
According to the UN experts, In the Red Sea, waterborne improvised explosive devices were being used to attack commercial vessels at anchor in Saudi ports and in some cases over 1,000 kms away from Yemeni shores. It appears almost certain that those devices were launched from a ‘mothership’, which would have towed the devices for most of the journey, they said.
