Feature: Forcible recruitment plunges younsters into abyss in S. Sudan

Since the eruption of the bloody conflict in South Sudan in 2013, the rebels have forcibly recruited tens of thousands of children who are paying the price for the deadly clashes between South Sudan's warring parties.

The Inter-Governmental Authority for Development in Africa (IGAD) said in its newest report on Thursday that an armed South Sudanese group has recruited nearly 1,000 children in Upper Nile which has recently witnessed violent battles.

The Shiluk rebels, led by Gen. Johnson Olony, "carried out a forcible recruitment of an estimated 500 to 1,000 youth, many of whom were children aged between 13 and 17 years," the report said.

It said the rebels recruited children during house-to-house searches in the northern villages of Kodok and Wau Shilluk.

This was not the first accusation directed to various warring parties in South Sudan of forcible recruitment of children.

To this end, Peter Mengilwak, a South Sudanese political analyst, told Xinhua that "children recruitment is a continuing systematic work by most of the warring parties in South Sudan."

"They (the warring parties) insist to destroy the South's future, represented in its children. Instead of pushing them to school rooms, they force the children to carry arms as soldiers in a war that they do not even know its causes," he noted.

"The South Sudanese rivals are morally and legally responsible for the systematic recruitment of children" he said, adding that "one day they will be punished for what they have committed against the children."

Earlier, the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) pointed out in a report the atrocities committed against children in South Sudan, saying that boys were castrated and left to bleed to death and girls, as young as eight, were gang raped and murdered.

According to the UNICEF, around 13,000 children have been recruited since the fighting broke out in South Sudan, while at least 129 children were killed during battles at the oil-rich Upper Nile and Unity states last May.

Additionally, the UN warned in another report that around 250,000 South Sudanese children are facing starvation due to military battles witnessed by the country since 2013.

"In half of the country, one in three children are acutely malnourished and 250,000 children face starvation," Toby Lanzer, UN humanitarian coordinator who was recently expelled from South Sudan, said in the report.

According to statistics, two thirds of the country's 12 million people are in dire need of aid, he said, pointing out that 4.5 million face severe food vulnerability.

The recent military clashes also displaced thousands of civilians who have fled to safe areas or UN protection bases.

South Sudan secured its independence in 2011. However, it plunged into violent clashes in December 2013 as fighting erupted between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and defectors led by his former deputy Riek Machar.

The conflict soon became an all-out war, with violence taking on an ethnic flavor, pitting the president's Dinka tribe against Machar Nuer's ethnic faction.

The warfare has left thousands of South Sudanese dead and forced around 1.9 million people to flee their homes. Endit