Feature: Kids in war-torn Yemen marks Children's Day with more air raids, dark future

Osamah Nabil has just waved goodbye to visitors who came to see him in a local hospital in capital Sanaa. With a beautiful smile on his face, the 12-year-old is still hopeful of a better tomorrow despite serious injuries he has inflicted in recent violence in Yemen. Yet the truth might not be so.

"I am not used to do something special on Children's Day because I knew about it from you just now. Well, I am still alive and will start celebrating it next year hopefully," said Osamah, a 12-year old under weeks of medical treatment at a state hospital in downtown capital Sanaa.

The kid's legs were broken and was also wounded in the head after Saudi-led air strikes mistook his house in the district of Noqom, Sanaa, for a weapon storage of the Shiite Houthi group.

The Saudi-led Arab coalition has launched a bombing campaign against the Houthi militants since late March in a bid to restore the rule of the exiled Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is now taking shelter in Saudi Arabia.

As Monday marks this year's International Children's Day, many Yemeni children are suffering from both physical and psychological injuries, while the country is still under constant air raids, leaving many more of its kids killed or wounded.

Laith Rajeh is the sole kid in the family. Whenever a bomb was dropped and an explosion cracked, the four-year-old would bury his head deep in his mother's chest, weeping as he held her arms tightly, said the father.

"I am very concerned about his situation in the future. He might face some problems... I mean psychological problems," the father said.

Like Nabil and Rajeh, children, who account for more than one third of the total population, has officially become the most vulnerable group in the war-torn Arab country.

In its latest statement on Yemen, The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said more and more children were either killed or injured in the war, and urged quick actions to protect them, and to bring an end to the hostilities that are devastating their lives and future.

Since the battles escalated in March, as many as 135 children have been killed and 260 injured, UNICEF said, pointing out that almost one-third of the deaths were reported in the southern port city of Aden.

Local Aden residents have been complaining of Houthi fighters and slammed the coalition's months-long siege around their city as a collective punishment.

On Monday, fierce fighting forced an aid ship to turn its head around before it could dock at the Aden port, yet in the seaside city hundreds of thousands of local families are suffering from lacks of supplies, clean water, power and security for almost two months.

The ever worsening humanitarian disaster has added to the persistent challenges Yemen's children have already been coping with, such as recruitment by armed groups, child labor, sky-high dropout rates, begging and malnutrition.

UNICEF said 847,445 children in Yemen under five suffered from acute malnutrition, and 160,629 children from severe acute malnutrition before the war. "If food shortages brought on by the current crisis are not addressed, malnutrition rates are likely to rise," it warned.

The UN agency also said that some two million children have been affected by the closure of over 3,700 schools.

Local newspaper Yemen Post reported that children below 18 represent one third of the fighters of Yemeni armed groups including the Houthis.

Yemen is one of the most impoverished country in the world where economic woes forced many children to leave school early for work or join the ranks of the armed groups in order to support their families.

Due to the ongoing war, the number of people who need emergency aid has increased to two thirds of the total population, including around 7.4 million children, according to the UN agencies.

The southern Taiz city, the third largest city in the country, has turned into a ghost city due to the absence of water, fuel, power and peace, said Sadik Ali, a local university teacher.

"There is nothing normal in our country at the moment. I am talking about the situation in general not only children," he said. Endit