Monitors: Hundreds More Child Soldiers Recruited in South Sudan

Local Editor

According to military monitors, warring forces in South Sudan had abducted as many as a thousand more child soldiers in the latest abuses in the 18-month long civil war.

Monitors from East Africa's eight-country IGAD bloc said in their latest report that militant troops carried out house-to-house searches snatching children as young as 13 in the battleground northern state of Upper Nile in two days in early June.

Furthermore, it blamed notorious militia commander Johnson Olony, a rogue ex-government general with a track record for press ganging children to fight, who joined militant forces in May.

Olony "carried out forcible recruitment of an estimated 500-1000 youth, many of whom were children aged between 13 and 17 years," the report said, adding the hundreds were taken "during house-to-house searches" in the northern villages of Kodok and Wau Shilluk.

"The youth were then taken to training camps," the report added.

Moreover, the UN children's agency estimated there are at least 13,000 child soldiers fighting in the country, and said last week that fighters had carried out horrific crimes against children.

Civil war began in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of planning a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings across the country that had split the poverty-stricken, landlocked country along ethnic lines.

According to the UN, two-thirds of the country's 12 million people need aid.

The IGAD report also said government troops had deliberately fired on some 30,000 civilians sheltering in a UN peacekeeping base in Upper Nile's state capital Malakal in May.

"It was evident that it was deliberate and sustained," the report read, adding that there was "no evidence" opposition forces were in the area.

"It is clear that firing by government forces was carried out with blatant disregard for the safety of civilians," it added.

Over two dozen armed forces - including government soldiers and allied militia backed by Ugandan soldiers on one side, and a range of insurgent factions on the other - had been battling it out for the last 18 months despite numerous ceasefire agreements.

Hence, IGAD warned that "military commanders at all levels are held accountable for the conduct of the forces under their command."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team