UNICEF: One-Third of Fighters in Yemen Are Children
Children make up a third of the combatants in Yemen's conflict with Saudi Arabia, says a U.N. official.
Yemeni children. (Julien Herneis / CC BY-SA 2.0)
Children make up a third of the combatants in Yemen’s conflict with Saudi Arabia, says a U.N. official.
Agence France-Presse reports via The Guardian:
“We are seeing children in battle, at checkpoints and unfortunately among [those] killed and injured,” Julien Harneis, Unicef’s representative in Yemen, said during a stop in Geneva.
He said staff of Unicef and its partners had estimated that around 30% of fighters in the armed groups were minors.
Saudi-led forces launched air strikes last month as Shia Houthi rebels advanced on Yemen’s main southern city of Aden after seizing the capital.
The president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, fled Aden for Saudi Arabia during the Houthi advance and the city has since seen heavy clashes between pro- and anti-government forces.
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The New York Times causes an international stir by estimating that 20 percent of Sudanese fighters in Yemen may be between 13 and 17.
Hillary Clinton spent years vowing to defend the rights of children worldwide, but under her leadership the State Department played a central role in allowing rebel forces in southern Sudan to use child soldiers in defiance of a 2008 law forbidding it.
Despite a law prohibiting it, the United States provided aid and assistance to armed groups that employed roughly 13,000 child soldiers in civil-war-wracked Sudan.
The United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. Its major public face is the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps.
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