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Militias Recruited 25 Children in Mahweet in May | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Media ID: 55375528
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Boys carrying rifles as they attend a rally held by women loyal to the Houthis in Sanaa, Yemen September 7, 2016. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah


Taiz – Houthi and Saleh militias recruited 25 children from Mahweet during the past months and got them involved in conflict fronts in Taiz, Midi and Nihm, said Mahweet Human Rights Organization.

The organization monitored that Mahweet – ruled by Saleh and Houthi militias – has underwent 451 violations by insurgents against civilians during May, including raiding villages and houses, kidnapping and recruiting children and displacing households.

Media Almahweet Center saw that the militias’ recruiting of a huge number of children indicates its shortage of human power due to the two-year war.

A statement by Mahweet Human Rights Organization revealed that insurgents have kidnapped 116 civilians, with 34 being physically and psychologically tortured, despite 11 others who are deliberately hidden and no one knows their place of detention.

Insurgents have been inciting killing, have disturbed 112 people, stalked media, raided three villages and three houses and displaced 11 households, according to the statement. It added that up to 40 state and private institutions are still under occupation while 12 others were transformed into barracks, while 17 schools for memorizing Quran were shut down.

Mahweet Human Rights Organization called on local and foreign organizations to “visit Houthi and Saleh insurgent militias prisons in Mahweet to check over the kidnapped and arrested and to take a closer look at the violations that can’t be discovered by the organization.”

It concluded in its statement that the mentioned violations are the ones that the organization managed to monitor and archive and that there are other violations that were not disclosed because of the militias’ pressure and their tension from any impartial rights act or professional media act.