(UPI) — The Nigerian insurgent group Boko Haram recruited 2,000 children to fight in 2016, a United Nations report released Tuesday said.
The data were part of a report indicating that at least 65,000 children, worldwide, were released from military and armed groups in the past 10 years. An estimated 17,000 children were recruited in South Sudan since 2013; there have been nearly 1,500 cases of child recruitment in Yemen the escalation of hostilities in 2015; and child soldiers in the Central African Republic have numbered 10,000, the report by UNICEF said.
Of those released from military servitude, more than 20,000 were in the Democratic Republic of Congo, nearly 9,000 in the Central African Republic and 1,600 in Chad.
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