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Yemeni Human Rights Center: UN Report Overlooks 3,400 Children in Taiz Affected by War | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Children ride on the back of a pick-up truck as they flee Sana’a on April 6, 2015 (Reuters/ Khaled Abdullah)


Riyadh- Angry reactions bubbled up as the United Nations published a report on children rights violations in Yemen citing inaccurate information provided by sources involved with coup militias in the war-torn country.

A report released yesterday by the Information and Training Center for Human Rights in Yemen’s Taiz province strongly condemned the UN report, slamming it as inaccurate.

“Taiz alone accounts for a much larger size of children rights abuses than that mentioned in the UN report– over 700 children were killed in Taiz only since the beginning of the war and 2,700 others were wounded by militia fire.”

The team criticized most UN reports because of its “deliberate and shameful silence on systematic crimes against civilians in Taiz.”

The Yemeni human rights group considered that the recent UN report “shows the extent of the significant gaps in the flow of information with UN Offices.”

“The UN report on child abuse in Yemen is unfair and reflects the extent to which the United Nations is being misled by its Sana’a-based sources,” said Arafat Abdel Latif, executive director of the Human Rights Information and Training Center.

“The truth on the ground confirms that the violations of Houthi militias and Saleh’s children’s forces are a systematic process aimed at slaying the future of Yemen,” he said.

Some 70 percent of the personnel of the rebel forces in Yemen are children, Yemeni Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdulmalik Mekhlafi said.

“Rebels are using children in this war, 70 percent of the personnel are children, children between the ages of nine and 17 … The recruitment of children must be stopped,” Mekhlafi said at a session on Yemen at the United Nations.

According to Mekhlafi, Yemen hopes that international bodies “will pay more attention” to programs of social security in the conflict-torn country.

“We need more money for these programs,” the minister added.

Yemen has been engulfed in a violent conflict between the internationally-recognized government headed by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and the Tehran-aligned Houthi militias, backed by armed loyalists supporting former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.