A time bomb.. Houthi summer camps for children create a generation booby-trapped with terrorism
Thousands of children are sent to camps in Houthi-controlled areas, where some are indoctrinated with sectarian ideology and taught to fight.
While children typically attend summer camps to take part in sports, crafts and other activities, camps in parts of Yemen controlled by the Houthis have been used to recruit and indoctrinate children and train them to fight.
Educational sources said that the summer camps opened by the Houthis in the three most important Yemeni governorates (Taiz, Sanaa and Amran), are about 965 summer centers.
Through summer camps, Houthis are skewing curricula administered to Yemeni kids, who are ultimately being brainwashed.
The Houthis have brought thousands of sectarian teachers for Shiite curricula and terrorist ideas in these centers with a view to implanting destructive thoughts in their minds. Sources said.
The number of centers set up by the Houthi militia in each of the capital Sanaa, 185 summer schools and employed 599 sectarian teachers, and Taiz, about 130 summer centers, while in Amran governorate, about 650 schools with 2500 sectarian teachers. Sources revealed.
The sources confirmed that about 88 other summer centers were distributed to the rest of the governorates, but they intensified that on the above mentioned governorates, as they represent the largest proportion of the number of children and youth.
Meanwhile, human rights defenders, activists and competent authorities have warned parents in areas controlled by the Houthi militia against allowing their children to join centers that violate childhood rights and seek to force them to be fuel for a war led by the militia in order to serve the sectarian and Iranian agenda in the country.
Jurists said that mothers bear full responsibility for what may happen to their children who join the militia camps, which implant in them their ideologies, sectarian and extremist ideas in their minds, and mobilize children and youth fighters and send them without the knowledge of their families to fight on their fronts.
Yemeni information minister encouraged Yemenis to save their children from being used as cheap bargaining chips by militias that do not care for their future.
Yemenis living under Houthi control must “preserve their families instead of handing them over as a cheap commodity to terrorist militias that have no regard for their lives,” urged Eryani.
He accused Houthis of deploying child soldiers to contact lines in the strategic northeastern governorate of Marib, where the pro-Iran group is using them as cannon fodder in an “aimless” war that sows both havoc and chaos in the battle-weary country.
“The international community and UN and US envoys need to carry out their legal and moral obligations regarding such practices,” noted Eryani, adding that Houthis must be pressured into ending their exploitation of Yemeni children.
