Houthis destroy Yemen's future by maintaining crimes against children
The Iran–aligned Houthi militia continues to commit violations against the children of Yemen by recruiting them within its ranks and allowing the death of many children by the landmines they plant in many areas.
Director of the Human Rights Office in the western Yemeni province of al-Jawf, Abdel Hadi al-Assar, revealed recently that a total of 32 children had been killed and injured in al-Ghayl District between October 1, 2016 and January 11, 2019.
Seven children had been killed because of Houthi shelling of the district, al-Assar said. Twenty-five other children were injured because of this shelling.
He called at a press briefing on the international community to stop denouncing the crimes of the Houthi militia and start taking action to bring this militia to justice.
Houthi mines
The Houthis plant mines everywhere they go. According to local and international reports, the Shiite militia had planted half a million mines in the cities they had been kicked out of. Some of these mines are internationally-banned. They killed hundreds of civilians and maimed thousands of others.
The international organization, Doctors without Borders, revealed on January 13 that dozens of Yemeni children had been injured when Houthi landmines went off in different areas of Yemen in the past months.
It said in a statement that its members had treated 150 injured children between August and December last year and that these children had been injured in landmine explosions.
A third of the injured children, the organization said, were playing in the minefields before they were injured.
It noted that all the injured children would be disabled for good.
Doctors without Borders warned that the effect of the landmines planted by the Houthis would continue to exist for many decades to come.
The Executive Demining Center had removed 300,000 mines in the past three years, the organization said.
On January 12, a source within the Yemeni army's Engineering Section estimated the number of landmines that had been removed from cities liberated from Houthi control at 5,800.
Recruitment
The recruitment of children is by far the Houthi's largest crime against the future of Yemen. Most of the children recruited within the militia end up dying.
Houthi leader, Abdel Malak al-Houthi, had sent an emissary, known as Saqr, to cities controlled by the militia to recruit school children in them. The militia leader took the move after his group sustained 5,000 human losses in battles in the port city of al-Hodeidah.
The Associated Press quoted Yemeni sources as saying that the Houthis had recruited a total of 18,000 children since the beginning of the war in Yemen in 2014.
Recruited children told the American news agency that they had been approached by Houhti recruiters while they were at schools, playing at soccer playgrounds and or their families' farms.
Before going to the battlefields, the children attend training military, religious and cultural courses for two months. The courses aim at brainwashing the children and filling them with the venomous Houthi ideology.
Yemeni government reports contain scary figures as far as the recruitment of children within the Houthi militia is concerned.
According to government reports, the Houthis had recruited 23,000 children within their ranks, including 2,500 children who had been recruited within the militia since the beginning of 2018.
Tough conditions
The Houthi militia had deprived more than 4.5 million children in the areas they control of education. These children include 600,000 who had been prevented from enrolling in schools in the past two years. The Houthis also shelled and destroyed 2,372 schools and turned more than 1,500 other schools into prisons and military barracks.
On December 30, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund said millions of Yemeni children are in danger. It said 1,427 children had been either killed or maimed because of the ongoing conflict in Yemen.
This makes matters worse in a country where a child dies every ten minutes of diseases that can be treated, the UN body said.
Around 400,000 children suffer malnutrition in Yemen now.
Uncertain future
The Houthi militia, observers said, implements a systematic strategy for the destruction of the children of Yemen with the aim of destroying the future of this country.
Yemeni Information Minister Muammar al-Eriani wrote on Twitter that the educational process in the cities controlled by the Houthis had deviated from its original course.
The schools, he added, had turned into centers for washing the brains of the children.
Rights advocate Mustafa Munsir called on the international community to start taking action against the Houthis.
He called for referring Houthi crimes against the children of Yemen to the International Court of Justice.
"The children of Yemen deserve to have a better future," Munsir wrote on Twitter.
