Houthis recruit children as young as 12, tell them they are fighting Jews
The Houthis have forcibly recruited children to fight in their war against Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-backed government, threatening families in territories they control and indoctrinating young people to believe they will be fighting against Jews and Zionists, a journalist who formerly worked in Houthi-controlled territory for a decade told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
“A,” who spoke on condition of anonymity, explained that he feared the Houthis would punish his friends and colleagues still working in Yemen if they became aware of his communication with the Post. He noted that the Houthis are already holding several international humanitarian workers hostage, in addition to local aid employees.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced earlier this week that the Houthis have already sent at least eight people involved in human rights and humanitarian work for criminal prosecution on espionage-related charges punishable by death, since August 18.
Though the Houthis’ use of child soldiers has long been documented, A said, “The problem is escalating and increasing with the recent developments.”
Houthis threaten citizens with death in order to recruit more soldiers
“Whenever they control new areas, the first thing they do is force people to be recruited. Otherwise, they will be punished, they will be imprisoned, or they will be killed,” he explained.
“So this is one of the most significant issues and one of the least reported issues when it comes to the war in Yemen, and Houthis also want to compensate for what they lost over the past days because they lost a lot of fighters in Mokha and in their recent fighting and battles.”
On the day that A spoke to the Post, he received a call from humanitarian contacts on the ground in Houthi-controlled territory warning him that the Houthis had begun indiscriminately shelling homes and schools and that bodies of women and children were being piled high.
Given that A spent years working in Houthi-controlled territory, the Post asked him how the Houthis could justify killing Yemeni civilians, particularly given that the vast majority of their victims are Muslim.
Explaining that the reason the Houthis are comfortable killing their own people is the same reason that makes a peace agreement with them impossible, A said that it was “firmly” embedded in their ideology that they have the “divine right to govern… not only controlling all of Yemen, but also they want to control Mecca and Medina and Saudi Arabia.”
“They believe that they have the divine right to govern the world, not only the Arabian Peninsula, and so they consider people who fight them or who try to resist them as traitors, and recently as Zionists,” he continued, adding that the issue has only worsened since October 7, 2023.
Houthis use Israel-Hamas War to recruit child soldiers
A said the Israel-Hamas War had been a “good excuse to recruit,” with videos of the war in Gaza regularly played to children to incite them against Israel. He added that, before October 7, there had been growing discontent with the Houthis, particularly over unpaid wages; still, many were more willing to tolerate the missed payments either because they wanted to support the Palestinian cause or because they did not want to be labeled as Zionists.
Estimating that tens of thousands of children had been enlisted into the Houthis’ ranks since Hamas’s invasion, A noted that children aged between 12 and 15 had been captured attempting to fight government forces, proclaiming that they had traveled to the front to fight the Jews.
The anti-Israel popular opinion in Yemen among the entire population, A said, had also made the indoctrination of children easier, as many didn’t need to shift their thinking on the issue dramatically to align with the Houthis.
“They exploited what they called the Islamic background and people’s support for the Palestinian cause,” he said, adding that it has now begun to backfire and there is a growing number of Yemenis who feel resentful toward the Palestinians.
“People are fed up even with the Palestinian cause because it has caused a lot of damage to the country. The sentiment of people toward the Gaza issue and the Palestinian cause has gone down sharply because they saw how the Houthis decided to kill Yemenis in the name of Gaza.
“They saw how the Houthis isolated Yemen by attacking vessels in the Red Sea in the name of Gaza. They saw how the Houthis even cut the income of thousands of fishermen who went jobless because of the Houthis’ ventures in the Red Sea,” A added.
“So people saw the economic consequences of the Houthis’ actions over the past three years and started complaining and also started realizing that the Palestinian cause is not our cause. Yemen is our cause. So this sentiment has shifted dramatically, but they continued to recruit and mobilize support inside Yemen in the name of fighting the US and Israel.”
Adding to the bitterness, A said it was hard watching pro-Palestinian activists in the West celebrate the Houthis and ignore comments from Yemenis trying to tell them that the group was a terrorist organization even if it partially aligned with their viewpoint.
“Gaza became a trend and profitable thing for many people, including Palestinians, and the shocking fact is how many Palestinian activists, journalists, and thinkers turn and support the Houthis at the expense of Yemenis and at the expense of Yemeni suffering,” A said.
