A pair of one-year-old twins were found abandoned, malnourished and strapped to an explosive belt in a village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Friday.
“The expanding use of improvised explosive devices is just one of several recent, depraved trends,” Grant Leaity, UNICEF’s Representative in the DRC, said at a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Leaity met the twins at a center in North Kivu for children freed from armed groups, he said.
“On a daily basis, children are being raped and killed. They are being abducted, recruited and used by armed groups – and we know the reports we have are only the tip of the iceberg,” Leaity said, per the press release.
North Kivu reportedly had over 38,000 cases of sexual- and gender-based violence between January and March, up 37 percent from figures for the first quarter of 2022. “Those are the ones reported. And in North Kivu alone,” said Leaity.
North Kivu is a border province in Eastern Congo, bordering Uganda and Rwanda. Some 1.2 million children under five in Eastern Congo are at risk of acute malnutrition, with preventable diseases such as cholera and measles spiraling into epidemics in the country, per the press release.
“As the world looks away, we are failing the children of DRC,” said Leaity. (RELATED: Report: ISIS-Linked Rebels Attack School, Kill 41)
Child alert for Eastern DRC today at the Palais des Nations https://t.co/62dmOJlW0A
— Grant Leaity (@grant_leaity) September 8, 2023
Armed men killed at least 18 people, burning three of the bodies, on Thursday in Irumu territory in North Kivu’s neighboring province of Ituri, triggering a massive displacement of civilians, Reuters reported.