NAIROBI, 11 November 2009 (IRIN) - An increasing number of Somali children are being recruited by the Somali armed forces or militia groups in violation of international law, civil society activists have warned.
"Children as young as 8-9 are joining militias in greater numbers than at any time in the past," Abdinoor Ilmi of Peaceline, a Somali civil society group, told IRIN on 11 October: "They are being recruited at an alarming rate.
Many of the children are joining because their families are unable to provide for them, he said. "For many it is a question of survival and a sense of belonging. Simply put, they get to eat and find some sort of support network.
Hodan Hussein, a displaced mother of four, told IRIN that her 16- and 14- year-old boys had left the camp they were living in without her knowledge, and she was not sure what they were doing.
"There are days that I cannot find enough for one meal," she said. "The boys simply left to find something better. I could not stop them."
Katherine Grant, a child protection specialist in Nairobi with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Somalia, said violations of childrens' rights to protection were widespread, though exact figures were not available.
"UNICEF is appalled by the scale of the recruitment of children into militias by all sides," she said.
There are 700,000-800,000 displaced children, roughly half of the total number of displaced, according to UNICEF. Most, Ilmi said, were lucky if they got one meal a day. Peaceline conducted a survey this week in camps in the Afgooye corridor, near Mogadishu.
Nutritional situation "detereorating very rapidly"
Hussein Ali Mohamed, a doctor with the UK-based charity Islamic Relief, who runs a clinic in one of the camps told IRIN that most of the children he was seeing were suffering from malnutrition.
"Unfortunately the nutritional situation of both children and adults is deteriorating very rapidly," he said, adding that most aid agencies had reduced their activities on the ground.
He also blamed insecurity which was forcing people to move more frequently, "making them inaccessible to the help".
Child exploitation was also on the increase, with children prone to abuse and neglect, according to Ilmi, who said the worst affected were orphaned children who had lost their parents in the violence. He also said more children were dropping out of school, especially those from food aid-dependent families. Ilmi called for the setting up of emergency schools in and around the camps.
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