Yemen war deprived 4.5m children of education

Some 4.5 million Yemeni children have been deprived of education since Houthis took control of the capital Sanaa in 2014, the country’s Yemen’s Minister of Social Affairs and Labour Ibtihaj Al-Kamal revealed yesterday.

The minister accused the Houthis of turning schools into military barracks and injecting hate and racism into textbooks.

In the statement, issued on World Children’s Day yesterday, she said that the Houthis recruited more than 23,000 children and kidnapped 700 others.

As a result of the landmines planted arbitrarily in the areas controlled by the Houthis, 800 children were killed or injured.

The minister also said that two million children of a total of three million born since the start of the unrest suffer health problems.

UNICEF: 12m Yemen children in need for urgent help 

A further two million have been forced to join the labour market after the collapse of the economy and as a result of the death of the families’ main breadwinners.

Impoverished Yemen has remained in a state of civil war since 2014, when Houthi rebels overran much of the country, including the capital Sanaa.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies launched a massive air campaign aimed at reversing Houthi military gains and shoring up Yemen’s embattled government.

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, more than 100,000 people have been killed in the war, while more than 11 per cent of the country’s population has been displaced.