New Delhi: India’s Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla on Monday expressed worry over children being recruited by terror groups and this being compounded by pandemic via online ways of radicalization. Shringla was speaking at a UN Security Council Open Debate on Children and Armed Conflict organized by Estonia as the president of the body for the month of June.
Shringla said, “We are witnessing a dangerous and worrying trend in global terrorism and that is an increase in the number of children that are being recruited and involved in terrorism-related activities.”
“Terror groups take advantage of the fact that children are the most susceptible”, he explained. “School closures due to the pandemic have provided an even greater opportunity to these terrorist groups to target children, including through online avenues, for radicalization and indoctrination in violent extremist ideologies,” he added.
A global treaty came into effect in 2002 that forbids non-state armed…