(UNICEF MENA) – “UNICEF welcomes the release of 125 children associated with armed conflict in Zintan, northwest of Libya, with support from the Zintan municipal Council. “Recruitment of children is a grave violation of children’s rights, and one that has irreparable and lifelong consequences. We encourage other councils across Libya to follow suit. Link
(AMISOM) – The Training of Trainers (ToT) by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) to prevent the recruitment and use of children as child soldiers in Somalia closed in Nairobi yesterday with participants calling for an end to the use of minors in armed conflict. The 12-day training that involved at least 23 participants […]
(Newsweek) – The use of child soldiers remains alarmingly common in conflicts across the world. From Syria and Iraq to Nigeria and South Sudan, multiple governments and armed groups are exploiting children to fight adult wars. Link
(IOM) – Since 25 August, thousands of Rohingya refugees have crossed into Bangladesh in monsoon rains, fleeing Northern Rakhine State, Myanmar. For days, over 6,900 Rohingya refugees were stranded in desperate conditions on a mucky strip of no-man’s land in Anjuman Para on Bangladesh’s side of the border. Link
(Save the Children) – Overcrowding, a lack of schooling and widespread desperation among the Rohingya in camps and makeshift settlements in Bangladesh are putting children at an alarming risk of exploitation and abuse, Save the Children has warned. More than 450,000 school-age Rohingya children are currently out of school in Bangladesh – including 270,000 who have […]
(Axios) – The U.S. government may have broken its own law by providing support to the South Sudanese military, which has displaced over a million people in what the U.N. labeled “ethnic cleansing,” according to an AP investigation. Per the AP, this is the “largest exodus of civilians in Africa since the Rwanda genocide in 1994.” […]
(HRW) – This submission relates to Articles 28 and 38 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and focuses on the protection of students, teachers, and schools during armed conflict. Link
(Reuters) – Children are starving to death in Central African Republic because violence has forced aid workers to pull out, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the country said on Tuesday. Four years after a conflict began between Muslim Seleka rebels and Christian “anti-balaka” militias, Central African Republic had seemed calm in the early part of the […]
(PBS) – ISIS had more than two years to dig into Mosul before Iraqi forces launched an offensive to retake Iraq’s second-largest city last October. In that period, ISIS fighters knocked holes into the walls between neighboring houses, so that they could move without being targeted by airstrikes. By the time the offensive began, ISIS […]
(PBS) – The cholera epidemic in Yemen is now the largest and fastest growing outbreak of the disease in modern history — the result of a crippling war that has devastated the country, long the poorest in the Arab world, and unleashed a major humanitarian crisis. At last count on October 11, the World Health Organization reported […]