Aden // When Ahmed Al Sorori, 14, ran away from home in Sanaa, his mother thought he had just gone back to the family’s village 100 kilometres away.
The next time she saw him was when his body was returned two weeks later. Ahmed had been lured into the ranks of Houthi rebel fighters and sent to the front lines in Taez where he was killed in July.
Like an increasing number of Yemeni boys, the teenager had been turned into one of Yemen’s child soldiers and forced to fight in a conflict which has killed hundreds of children.
Nearly one third of fighters in the armed groups involved in the Yemen conflict are under 18, according to the UN. The Houthis, who seized the capital more than a year ago before striking south to Aden, are responsible for the vast majority.
“Ahmed joined the battle together with his bad friends, who deceived him and they are responsible for his death,” his mother, Ghazal, told The National.
“When Ahmed’s friends gave me his dead body, they told me that he was a martyr. I shouted at them to leave me alone with his body.
“I asked his brothers to prevent Ahmed’s friends from coming to my house again,” she added.
From her home in Mosaik in Sanaa, she described how her son disappeared in mid June.
“I did not know that he went to Taez – I thought that he left for our village in Dhamar,” she said.
After a week, Ahmed’s friends told her that he had been sent to Taez by the Houthis.
“I worked hard to get him back but I could not find him,” she said. “No one told me how he joined the war.”
Ghazal, who has three daughters and five sons, lost her husband 10 years ago. She said she had tried hard to prevent Ahmed from being persuaded by his friends to join the Houthis.
Since 2013, there has been a big increase in the recruitment and use of children by Yemen’s armed groups. According to a Unicef report in August, 377 children between the ages of 9 and 17 had been drafted into the war in 2015. The number is more than double the figure of 156 child-soldier recruitments reported by the UN agency in 2014, the vast majority of whom were taken into the ranks of the Houthis.
The Iran-backed rebels, who hail from Sadaa province in the north, posted many of the boys at checkpoints in Sanaa after they ousted the internationally recognised government from the capital in September last year.
Many could be seen riding on armoured vehicles and guarding seized government buildings, Unicef said.
In May, Human Rights Watch also called on the Houthis to stop using child soldiers.
The child soldiers reportedly receive salaries, although it is not clear whether it is on the same scale as adults.
Yemen’s government, which is currently based in Aden and fighting to recapture territory held by the Houthis, signed up to a UN action plan in 2014 to end the recruitment of children into armed groups. But months later, after the Houthis power grab, the practice increased sharply.
Under Yemeni law, military service can only start at 18. International laws state that the use of children under the age of 15 in a conflict zone is a war crime.
Ali Al Dhafeeri would fall under that category. The 13-year-old stood at a checkpoint in Police College Street in Sanaa recently, armed with a Kalshnikov, inspecting cars as they passed.
He said he had joined the Houthi rebels in April at the request of his father, who also signed up.
The boy said he had not yet used his weapon, but was prepared to do so when the time came.
He said that along with other members of his family, he was “protecting the country from Al Qaeda and ISIL members, and we consider this as a kind of national duty”.
Ali, originally from Al Mihweet province, stopped going to school two years ago. “There is no advantage from study. Our country needs men to protect it, not educated people,” he said as he chewed on qat, a narcotic leaf popular across Yemen.
Jamal Al Shami, chairman of the Democracy School, an NGO based in Sanaa, said it was not just the Houthis using child soldiers.
In Taez city, a major front line in the conflict, witnesses said fighters resisting the Houthis were also using children to man checkpoints.
“The children cannot know the good and the bad things,” Mr Al Shami said, and called on parents to make sure their children were not being recruited into the conflict.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
* With reporting from a correspondent in Sanaa
