united nations (ap) — Nearly 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s Houthi rebels died on the battlefield between January 2020 and May 2021, and the Iranian-backed insurgents continue to hold camps and courses encouraging children to participate in the fight, United Nations experts say in a new report.
In the report addressed to the UN Security Council and released on Saturday, the experts said they investigated some summer camps in schools and a mosque where the Houthis have spread their ideology and sought to recruit children to fight Yemen’s internationally recognized government. , which is backed by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia. The conflict has now lasted seven years.
“Children have been taught to shout the Houthi slogan ‘death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory for Islam,'” the four-expert panel said. “In a camp, 7-year-olds were taught to clean weapons and evade missiles.”
The experts said they documented 10 cases in which minors were taken into combat after being told they would be enrolled in cultural courses or had already taken such courses, nine cases in which humanitarian assistance was provided or denied to families “solely on the basis of whether their children participated in the fighting or to teachers on the basis of whether they taught the Houthi curriculum”, and one case in which sexual violence was committed against a minor during military training.
The panel said it received a list of 1,406 Houthi-conscripted children who died on the battlefield in 2020 and a list of 562 who perished in fighting between January and May 2021.
“They were between 10 and 17 years old,” the experts said, and “a significant number” of them died in Amran, Dhamar, Hajjah, Hodeida, Ibb, Saada and Sana’a.
Yemen has been the scene of a civil war since 2014, when the Houthis captured the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north, prompting the government to flee south and then to Saudi Arabia.