Saudi Arabia is using child soldiers in its war on Yemen, and this goes against international laws and norms. RNA - More specifically, the illegal practice goes against the Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions which prohibit the military recruitment and use of children under the age of 15, which is now recognized as a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002). It applies to both government-controlled armed forces and non-state armed groups.
The prohibition on the use of children under 15 was reaffirmed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which also defined a child as any person under the age of 18. The standard was raised again by the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, also known as OPAC (2000).
OPAC was the world’s first international treaty wholly focused on ending the military exploitation of children. The treaty prohibits the conscription of children under the age of 18 and their participation in hostilities. It also prohibits the voluntary recruitment of children by non-state armed groups.
Nevertheless, the protocol has failed to stop Saudi Arabia from using child soldiers in the Yemeni war. What’s more, the United States is now aiding and abetting the Saudi use of child soldiers. This includes the use of Sudanese child soldiers as young as 14 years of age to wage their vicious assault on Yemen, which has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Western media outlets report that children make up at least 20 percent of Saudi units. They go on to state in horror that to keep a safe distance from the battle lines, "their Saudi or Emirati overseers command the Sudanese fighters almost exclusively by remote control, directing them to attack or retreat through radio headsets and GPS systems provided to the Sudanese officers in charge of each unit".
It’s the same sentiment shared by anti-war activists. They go on to highlight the fact that - by continuing to send the Saudis arms and provide other military assistance - the United States is directly complicit in Riyadh’s war crimes and use of children as soldiers in its years-long war on Yemen. "Children paid to kill children. This is how our 'ally,' Saudi Arabia, wages its disgusting war on Yemen," writes Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund. "And we help pay for it."
Sad to say, nearly all of the Sudanese soldiers paid by Saudi Arabia to fight in Yemen "appear to come from the battle-scarred and impoverished region of Darfur, where some 300,000 people were killed and 1.2 million displaced during a dozen years of conflict over diminishing arable land and other scarce resources." Taking advantage of its vast oil wealth, Saudi Arabia is now paying thousands of dollars to desperate Sudanese families in order to lure their children to fight in Yemen, where millions of people have deliberately been pushed to the brink of famine by the blockade.
This comes amid a ceasefire agreement between various combatants in Yemen and growing push by the international community to end American and Western complicity in the Saudi atrocities, which have often been carried out with weaponry made in the US and Europe. The Sweden-based ceasefire agreement has resulted in another deal as well, with the warring parties agreeing to reopen Kilo 16, the main road connecting the port city of Hodeidah and Taiz to the capital city of Sana’a. In other words, the Yemenis want peace.
According to Fars News Agancy, this is a huge move for civilians as well, allowing them to travel out of war zones to safer places, and also allowing for humanitarian aid shipments out of the aid port of Hodeida to those other cities. At any rate, this should be more than enough to convince Saudi Arabia and its partners to end their illegal war and blockade, withdraw their occupying troops from the impoverished nation, stop their indiscriminate airstrikes, and stop recruiting child soldiers from Africa who have nothing to do with the sectarian warfare they have waged on the poorest nation in the Arab world.
Whatever this is, most states have signed OPAC, which is slowly driving the world towards a de facto ban on the use of children in warfare. As a UN Member State which has ratified OPAC, Saudi Arabia should release the children it has recruited for its brutal war on Yemen. As per other international standards, the Saudis should also stop recruiting adults from other parts of the world for their unwinnable war.
Under OPAC and other international standards and norms, UN bodies must hold Saudi Arabia to account on their commitments, so that no child is subject to their military exploitation. The Saudis know better than anyone else what the universal adoption of OPAC means and why they cannot use children for military recruitment of any kind.
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