The International Human Rights Watch has urged the UN Security Council to pressure the government and the opposition and its allies to release children from their forces.

It made the call in a report issued on Monday, indicating that about 16, 000 children were conscripted into the army to fight during the conflict between the two parties.

The rights group says the figure was verified by the UN children’s Agency, UNICEF.

The report states that in some cases, children are forced onto trucks to battles or training camps at gunpoint.

The Human Rights Watch says after they have been released, the children should be given psychosocial assistance for them to be able to reintegrate easily into their families and communities.

“So we need immediate steps to identify children, release them, and take steps against those that recruited them,” Jo Becker, Advocacy Director of Children’s Rights at the Human Rights Watch, told Aljazeera TV.

However, Ms Becker says the United Nations has entered several agreements with both the government and the opposition on recruitment of child soldiers in the recent past.

Two sides, she stated, made serious commitments to release children from the army, and that there has been great improvement.

For its part, the government says it is ready to work with any of the child rights groups to investigate where the children are being recruited.

“When we receive this report, the procedure will be to dispatch a team that will work in conjunction with the Ministry of Defense and a United Nations agency which is actually taking care of the child rights, in order to go and verify and identify where the children are being recruited,” said Ateny Wek Ateny, Presidential Spokesperson.

In the report, the Human Rights watch also urges the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan and more targeted sanctions on individuals found to perpetuate the conflict.