Yemen – Children without a future pay the price of Houthi terrorism
Instead of helping them overcome poverty and disease, children find themselves carrying arms for the Houthi militia and demanding to go to the battlefields instead of to school.
Crimes against children
The Chinese newspaper “Global Times” published an investigation on the injuries of children by Houthi shrapnel during the years of war, which completely destroyed their future, as many of them are no longer able to move and some of them became prisoners of bed, unable to perform any normal tasks in the day. Hassan Jaidi, a Yemeni boy, was a prisoner of his bed since being hit by shrapnel in the head and spine from a Houthi shell during a military attack more than six years ago that caused him to become completely paralyzed.
The tragedy occurred in January 2016, a little more than a year after the outbreak of the civil war in Yemen. As fierce fighting between Yemeni government forces and Houthi rebels spread to Midi District in the northwestern province of Hajjah, Jaidi, sitting on his battered wooden and rope bed in front of his family’s home on the outskirts of Midi, said: “I was playing alone when that shell landed and exploded near the house, pushing me through the air”, the 12-year-old recalled the last glimpse before he lost consciousness: “I saw my blood pour out of my body”. As soon as the explosion and smoke rose, Hassan’s mother, older brother and neighbors fled the farm to find him bloodied. They rushed him to a hospital near the border with Saudi Arabia, dozens of kilometers north of his home.
Difficulty of treatment
Islam al-Sabri, a local doctor, said: Hassan and others desperately need financial assistance to take them to a specialized hospital outside the besieged provinces to complete their treatment, but his older brother Ahmed, 22, said: “The family has no money to transport Hassan to such hospitals in other cities, where their father died just weeks before the civil war broke out in late 2014, leaving the family of eight disabled in the tragic war”.
Following the attack, Hassan’s family fled with many other residents to a camp for displaced Yemenis near the Saudi Arabian border, where they stayed for nearly three years, and then returned home after the Yemeni army, supported by the Arab coalition, retook the area from the Houthis in April 2018.
Victims of war
Hassan is just one of many Yemeni children who have been maimed or permanently disabled in crossfire or from explosive remnants across the war-torn country. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned of the increasing number of victims of rockets, landmines, cluster bombs and remnants of war in Yemen. Since the conflict in Yemen escalated, the UN has verified that more than 10,200 children have been killed or injured, and the actual number is likely much higher.
Yemen’s civil war broke out in late 2014 after the Iran-backed Houthi militia overran and took control of several northern governorates, forcing the Saudi-backed Yemeni government out of the capital Sana’a.
