September Net – Yasser Algaradi

Houthi militia is persisting on recruiting Yemeni children and involving them in its criminal war, in stark violation to the International Laws of Children Rights.

Yemeni children continue to suffer at the hands of the Iran-backed Houthi militia. Amid silence of International Community, whose calls and programs through several organizations, have failed  to protect children Yemen.

The movements of the international community, through its organizations and laws, are ink on paper and press statements only. They just put in their slogans and calls compassionate and verbal words.

In return, Houthi militia has been claiming lives of Yemeni children by pushing them to fight in their ranks, killing them with indiscriminate artillery shelling, and depriving them of food by worsening hard living conditions.

In fact, the number of Houthi militia’s child soldiers in Yemen is terrifying. They have recruited more than 30 thousand Yemeni children and still recruiting them, in violation to international agreements and child protection laws. The Houthi rebels recruited 5000 children in 2018 alone.

They kidnap children from their  schools and homes and send them to battles, and practice pressure on their parents to send them to fronts, in a stark challenge to international laws related to child protection.

Meanwhile, the Houthi militia’s war and coup has forced more than two million child into labor markets. Children have to work to save their families from starvation. They also have denied over 4.5 million child from accessing education, including one million and 600 thousand children in the past two years

The Houthi militia have destroyed 2372 schools fully and partially, and turned 1500 schools into prisons and military barracks.

The use of children on the battlefield by the coup militia attributed to the decrease in the numbers of its fighters, as a result of the killing of large numbers of them, and the reluctance of many to participate in the senseless war they are waging with the support of Iran, which is striving to achieve a project of sectarian and racial domination.

The Houthi militia is practicing the  most heinous crimes against children by forcing them to abandon their childhood and violating their most basic rights to a better life and to send them to war as combatants and human shields, at a time when the United Nations and international organizations are advocating against child labour.

The militia has continuously intensified its campaigns for the recruitment of children in villages and towns under its control, and has established camps to recruit and train them and redeploy them on the fronts.

As the militia continues to drag the children into the fighting, their families remain unable to talk about the abduction and recruitment of their child soldiers for fear of reprisals by Houthi militiamen, as in the case of international relief agencies operating in child protection programmes that are not allowed to discuss the exploitation of children recruited by the Houthi militia for fear of banning its work.