According to a report published on Thursday, the Iran-backed Houthi extremists of Yemen are still using child soldiers despite firm promises made to the United Nations to discontinue the practice.
The Houthis were classified as a foreign terrorist organization until President Joe Biden delisted them in one of his earliest official acts.
The Houthis were well-known for recruiting large numbers of child soldiers at the time Biden rewarded them by removing their terrorist designation. They were also well-known for terrorism, and they have not cut back on that either, as frustrated Biden administration officials have admitted.
A report called “Militarized Childhood” from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor and Geneva-based SAM for Rights and Liberties in February 2021 found the Houthis have “forcibly recruited 10,300 children in Yemen since 2014.” Hundreds of those children have been killed and injured in Yemen’s brutal civil war.
According to “Militarized Childhood,” the Houthis use schools to lure children into military service by indoctrinating them with the group’s violent supremacist ideology. They also pressed children into service by threatening their families and offering cash rewards. These tactics were especially effective with Yemen’s many displaced populations.
At the time of the report, the Houthis had opened 52 training camps especially for children. Some of the trainees were only ten years old. Eyewitnesses in Yemen have reported seeing 7-year-olds working as guards at Houthi checkpoints.
“I was assigned with loading the guns and transporting them with foodstuffs to high, rugged areas. It was hard and exhausting. I used to get beaten and reprimanded when I arrived late. I cried a lot during those nights, fearing for my life and for missing my mother, father and brothers,” a 14-year-old child soldier told investigators.
The report’s authors noted that recruiting children under the age of 15 is considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and called on the U.N. Security Council to address the issue.
The U.N. acknowledged the problem and produced its own report in January 2022, counting almost 2,000 child soldiers aged 10 to 17 who were killed while fighting for the Houthis during the previous two years.
U.N. investigators personally witnessed the horrifying recruitment activities described in “Militarized Childhood,” as the Associated Press (AP) reported in January. A four-member panel of U.N. experts reported seeing children as young as 7 being taught to “clean weapons,” “evade rockets,” and recite the Houthi slogan: “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
The U.N. experts documented ten cases of children being taken to the front lines for combat after they were lured into taking “cultural courses,” plus nine cases of families told they would not be allowed to access humanitarian aid unless they gave their children to the Houthis.
The Houthis signed a U.N. action plan to eliminate child soldiers in April 2022.
Human Rights Watch optimistically described U.N. action plans as a “powerful tool to prompt warring parties to end violations against children,” but qualified its enthusiasm by noting that both the Houthis and their adversaries in the civil war – namely the legitimate Yemeni government and the Saudi-led Gulf State coalition supporting it – “have a poor record of keeping such commitments.”
The AP reported on Thursday that the Houthis’ record of not keeping their human rights commitments remains impeccable:
Two Houthi officials said the rebels recruited several hundred children including as young as 10 over the past two months. Those children have been deployed to front lines, as part of a buildup of forces taking place during a U.N.-brokered truce, which has held for more than two months, one official said.
The officials, both hardliners within the Houthi movement, said they see nothing wrong with the practice, arguing that boys from 10 or 12 are considered men.
“Those are not children. They are true men, who should defend their nation against the Saudi, American aggression, and defend the Islamic nation,” one of them said. The two spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid frictions with others among the Houthis.
According to this report, the Houthis are still running their indoctrination and child soldier recruitment centers, ghoulishly referred to as “summer camps” and located in “schools and mosques around the Houthi-held part of Yemen.”
Four international aid workers told the AP that the Houthis have “intensified” child soldier recruitment over the past few weeks, to replenish their battlefield losses. Child soldiers have been spotted fighting at Marib, currently the bloodiest battle in the Yemeni civil war.
The aid workers said the Houthis “have pressured families to send their children to camps where they learn how to handle weapons and plant mines, in return for services including food rations from international organizations.”
In other words, the Houthis are blocking international humanitarian aid unless families surrender their children to the child-soldier meat grinder. A Yemeni couple told the AP that Houthi recruiters explicitly threatened to withhold food rations unless they handed over their five children, age 11 to 16.
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