Begin with the children: Child soldier numbers doubled in the Middle East in 2019
April 14, 2020
Mick Mulroy, Eric Oehlerich, Zack Baddorf
A global problem
In 2017, the advocacy group Child Soldiers International estimated that more than 100,000 children were forced to become soldiers in state and non-state military organizations in at least 18 armed conflicts worldwide. The UN further reported that a majority of these children were actually under the age of 15 and that 40 percent of them were girls. This is a global problem that is getting worse and it must be addressed.
The UN has identified 14 countries where children have been widely used as soldiers. These countries are Afghanistan, Colombia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The use of child soldiers not only spans the globe, it also happens in many locations where the world’s superpowers have deployed their own military forces. Therefore, those superpowers have a responsibility to help end this practice of child exploitation.
https://www.mei.edu/publications/begin-children-child-soldier-numbers-doubled-middle-east-2019
