GENEVA – All sides in Yemen’s bloody conflict may have committed warcrimes, UN investigators said Tuesday, highlighting deadly air strikes,rampant sexual violence, and the recruitment of young children as soldiers.
In their first report, a team of UN-mandated investigators said they had”reasonable grounds to believe that the parties to the armed conflict inYemen have committed a substantial number of violations of internationalhumanitarian law.”
Many of these violations may amount to “war crimes” the report said, addingthat the investigators had identified a number of alleged perpetrators.
The devastating conflict in Yemen has left nearly 10,000 people dead sinceMarch 2015, when a Saudi-led coalition intervened to fight Huthi rebelsclosing in on the last bastion of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi’sgovernment.
The conflict in what was already one of the world’s poorest countries hascaused what the United Nations has described as the world’s worsthumanitarian crisis.
The UN’s so-called Group of Independent Eminent International and RegionalExperts, which was created by the UN Human Rights Council last September,detailed a long line of abuses committed by all parties to the conflict.
“There is little evidence of any attempt by parties to the conflict tominimise civilian casualties,” said the group’s chairman Kamel Jendoubi ina statement.
The report concluded that “coalition air strikes have caused most of thedocumented civilian casualties,” pointing to a large number of strikes onresidential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities,civilian boats and medical facilities.
“The specific cases investigated by the Group of Experts raise seriousconcerns about the targeting process applied by the coalition,” the reportsaid, pointing out that in many cases there were no apparent militarytargets in the vicinity of the attacks.——————————
*Child soldiers*——————————
The report covers the period from September 2014 through June 2018, anddoes not address the latest series of deadly strikes that have killeddozens of children in rebel-held areas and sparked international outrage.
The coalition has not confirmed or denied it carried out two air raids lastThursday that the UN said killed at least 26 children and four women southof the flashpoint rebel-held city of Hodeida.
Those deaths came after a coalition attack on a bus in the northern rebelstronghold of Saada early this month killed 40 children, prompting UNSecretary-General Antonio Guterres to call for an independent investigationof attacks targeting civilians in the three-year war.
Children have not only died in air strikes in Yemen.
The experts said they had “received substantial information indicating thatthe Government of Yemen, the coalition-backed forces and the Houthi-Salehforces have all conscripted or enlisted children into armed forces orgroups and used them to participate actively in hostilities.”
“In most cases, the children were between 11 and 17 years old, but therehave been consistent reports of the recruitment or use of children as youngas eight years old,” they added. – APP/AFP