Summer centers.. Labs to blow minds and recruit children for Houthi wars
English - Sunday 15 May 2022 الساعة 10:18 am
Sana'a, NewsYemen, private:
“Even more important than food and drink.” With this phrase, the leader of the Houthi group was addressing from behind a television screen to his supporters gathered in Al-Saleh Mosque in Sana’a, about the necessity of pushing their children to the summer centers that the group establishes every year in its areas of control.
The group’s leader’s emphasis on the importance of the summer centers goes back to their pivotal role in forming the group about 30 years ago in the mountains of Saada in northern Yemen, where the establishment of these centers began there in the mid-nineties by the group’s late spiritual father Badr al-Din al-Houthi and his dead son Hussein al-Houthi.
In a document dating back to the summer of 97 AD, published in the book “Al-Zahr and Al-Hajar.. The Shiite Rebellion in Yemen” by the writer Adel Al-Ahmadi, Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi appeared pleased with the success of the summer centers attended by more than 100 young people and children, in a letter addressed to Abdullah Aida Al-Razami, who later led the first rebellion of the group Al-Houthi against the state in 2004.
Al-Razami led the first rebellion after 10 years of summer centers led by Badr al-Din al-Houthi succeeded in establishing a nucleus for the group’s military arm through ideological fighters carrying the ideas and project of al-Houthi and ready to die for it.
In another document published by the same book, Badr al-Din al-Houthi identified about 13 items for those in charge of these centers for the contents of the ideas and beliefs that must be implanted in the students’ minds, the most important of which is stressing their indoctrination with sectarian beliefs and ideas from the books of the imams who ruled Yemen, led by Imam Ahmed bin Suleiman, Abdullah bin Hamza and Al-Qasim son of Mohammed.
What is noteworthy in this document was Badr al-Din al-Houthi’s stress to those in charge of the centers not to praise the “Matarfaiya” sect, which is a Zaidi sectarianism that appeared in the sixth century AH and was annihilated by Imam Abdullah bin Hamza after it was declared apostasy by Imam Ahmed bin Suleiman, because of the ideas of the sheikhs of this sect that blew up allegations Preference by lineage instead of work, which is the idea on which the principle of “guardianship” is based, and restricting it to the descendants of Al-Hasan and Al-Hussein, sons of Ali bin Abi Talib.
This emphasis indicates the seriousness of the summer centers launched by the Houthi group in its areas of control every year on the minds of children and adolescents and their reformulation with the group’s ideas. Informed sources in Sana’a say that the number of people enrolled in this center this year will exceed 600,000, while Houthi leader Hussein Al-Ezzi called on the group’s leadership To expand next year to accommodate more than two million students.
The figure put forward by the Houthi leader, "two million students", is the same number that the United Nations reports say is the number of students who are out of the educational process due to the war in Yemen, which reflects the size of the opportunity for the group to exploit these numbers in its sectarian centers and turn them into fighters, as confirmed by reports. International, the latest of which was the report of the Committee of Experts of the Security Council, issued early this year.
The report provided information about the Houthis’ use of summer centers and cultural courses to mobilize and encourage people to join the fight, and the team of experts monitored in some schools and a mosque that the Houthis use to spread their faith among children, and to promote hate speech and violence against certain groups.
The report said that nearly 2,000 children recruited by the Houthis died on the battlefield between January 2020 and May 2021, and confirmed that the Houthi militia continues to recruit children to fight.
