How many child soldiers are there in syria
On World Children’s Day: Tenth Annual Report on Violations against Children in Syria - Syrian Arab Republic
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At Least 29,661 Children Have Been Killed in Syria Since March 2011 Including 181 Due to Torture, with 5,036 Forcibly Disappeared
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has today issued its tenth annual report on violations against children in Syria. The report, issued to mark the annual World Children’s Day, reveals that at least 29,661 children have been killed in Syria since March 2011, including 181 due to torture, in addition to 5,036 arrested/forcibly disappeared children. The report stated that hundreds of children participated, along with their parents and other family members, in the peaceful protests across the country, representing symbols of the early hope and innocence of the uprising. And due to the Syrian regime’s relentless, brutal and indiscriminate mass arrests and targeting, shooting and killing of unarmed protesters, these violations were committed against children as well. This deliberate and calculated targeting of civilians and residential neighborhoods, which has been and remains a constant Syrian regime policy and a measure of the regime’s character, explains the terrible high numbers of child victims in the Syrian conflict.
The 55-page report mentioned that Syria’s leadership has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1993, as well as ratifying the two Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet, all the parties to the conflict have violated the rights of the child, and the Syrian regime has far exceeded all other parties in terms of the amount of crimes the regime perpetrated in a regular and systematic manner. The report stated that the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child, established by the Treaty Body for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, bears legal and ethical responsibilities to follow up on the situation of children’s rights in Syria and to help in bringing an end the violations perpetrated by the Syrian regime.
Fadel Abdul Ghany, executive director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said: “This report reminds us that many violations against children are still being perpetrated by the Syrian regime at such a level that they amount to crimes against humanity, including enforced disappearance, torture, and forced displacement. As the report confirms, hundreds of thousands of children have suffered and are still enduring the most intolerable humanitarian conditions, as they have done for years. This situation and these atrocious conditions can only continue because the reason for this continuing conflict – the existence of the ruling dictatorship, and the international community’s failure to find a political solution since 2012 – has not changed, indicating that new generations of Syrian children are facing a similar dark fate”
The report shed the light on the catastrophic state of children in Syria, and outlines the record of violations against children by the parties to the conflict and the controlling forces in Syria between March 2011 and November 20, 2021, according to SNHR database.
The report provided 10 accounts that SNHR collected through speaking directly with eyewitnesses, which are not cited from any open sources. The report is also based on the daily ongoing monitoring and verification of incidents and news and the collection of evidence and data, as well as analysis of videos and photos posted online.
The report refers to the cooperation between SNHR and the UNICEF Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM), and SNHR’s nomination of the Syrian child Muhammad Nour Al Asmar for the International Children’s Peace Prize for the year 2021.
The report documents the deaths of 29,661 children at the hands of the parties to the conflict and the controlling forces in Syria between March 2011 and November 20, 2021, including 22,930 children killed at the hands of Syrian Regime forces, 2,032 at the hand of Russian forces, 958 at the hands of ISIS, and 71 at the hands of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS). The report adds that the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have killed 237 children, while the Armed Opposition/ the Syrian National Army killed 996 children.
A further 925 children were killed as a result of attacks by the US-led coalition forces, and 1,512 children were killed at the hands of other parties. The Syrian regime is responsible for nearly 78% of extrajudicial killings, and accumulative index shows that 2013 was the worst year in terms of targeting children with killings following by 2012, 2014, 2016.
In terms of arrest/ detention, enforced disappearance, and torture, the report reveals that at least 5,036 children are still arrested/ detained or forcibly disappeared by the parties to the conflict and the controlling forces in Syria, including 3,649 at the hands of Syrian Regime forces, 42 at the hands of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham, 667 at the hands of Syrian Democratic Forces, and 359 at the hands of the Armed Opposition/ the Syrian National Army. The report adds that 319 of these children were arrested by ISIS before its retreat and are still forcibly disappeared, as of November 20, 2020. The report included an accumulative index graph for the arrests of children since March 2011, that showed 2014 was the worst year in terms of targeting children with arrests, and about 61% of the arrests recorded were at the hands of the Syrian regime forces.
As the report reveals, 181 children have been killed under torture in Syria since March 2011, including 174 in the Syrian regime’s detention centers, while two children in Hay’at Tahrir al Sham detention centers, and one child died under torture in the detention centers of each of ISIS, Syrian Democratic Forces and the Armed Opposition/ the Syrian National Army, and two children died due to torture at the hands of other parties.
The report revealed that Syrian regime forces have committed several types of sexual violence against children, pointing out the lasting physical and psychological ramifications on the victims. The report recorded at least 539 incidents of sexual violence against children.
According to the report, continued bombardment by the Syrian regime forces since March 2011, causing the total or partial destruction of at least 1,197 schools and 29 kindergartens, putting the majority of them out of service. The report also recorded the use of schools as military bases by the Syrian regime and its allies.
The report added that repeated forced displacement due to attacks and violations committed by the Syrian regime and its allies, as well as the deterioration of the education system, which led to the exclusion of tens of thousands of children from the educational process, and widespread poverty, have contributed to the spread of child labor. The report mentioned that the phenomenon of the worst forms of child labor is considered one of the most widespread phenomena in all regions of Syria.
Syrian regime forces regularly conscript children, a practice which they began from the earliest days of the popular movement, and facilitated children’s recruitment in foreign and local militias. There have been no investigations or accountability for any instances of child recruitment. Children conscription by the regime forces having resulted in the deaths of at least 62 children on Syria’s battlefields since March 2011 up until November 20, 2021. The report estimates that there are no less than 1,374 child soldiers in the Syrian regime forces ranks.
In addition, at least 78 children being recruited into Iranian militias or militias supported by Iran, 23 of them killed while participating in hostilities.
The report considered the remnants of the weapons used by the Syrian regime and its allies to bombard the areas not under its control in a massive and indiscriminate manner among the most prominent dangers that threaten the lives of civilians, especially children, at the forefront of these are the remnants of cluster munitions used in a large-scale and indiscriminate manner. The report recorded the death of at least 436 children, either in attacks where the Syrian regime used cluster munitions, or as a result of the explosion of old remnants of cluster munitions in areas previously bombed by the Regime using these weapons. While landmines planted by other parties to the conflict are the second threat after cluster munitions.
The report mentioned that according to the UNHCR, there are currently at least 2.5 million displaced children in Syria, most of whom live in camps or settlements of tents which cover large areas in most areas outside the control of the Syrian regime forces.
The displaced suffer from the worst living conditions, as the lack of healthcare facilities and educational centers in the camps has led to low levels of health, causing the children especially a lot of suffering, meaning that residents must travel for long distances or move simply to receive basic healthcare if any is available, and depriving them of access to education; all these factors have in turn caused steep increases in disease and illiteracy among the displaced children.
The report added that cluster munition attacks launched by the Russian forces since their military intervention on September 30, 2015, killed 67 children. And their military operations damaged no less than 220 schools.
The report also outlines the violations by Hay’at Tahrir al Sham, which, in addition to carrying out killings and detentions, has established training camps for children, enrolling them in sharia courses in an effort to influence their beliefs and to direct them to take up arms and fight similar to the tactics used by ISIS.
HTS has also taken control over many schools in areas under its control, and converted them to affiliated civilian and military headquarters. The report documents, as of November 20, 2021, that HTS had attacked three schools.
The report also sheds light on Syrian Democratic Forces’ widespread forced conscription of children. Although the Kurdish Self-Management authority signed a joint action plan with the United Nations to end the recruitment of children into its ranks and to demobilize those already recruited, while the People’s Protection Units and the Women’s Protection Units signed a commitment with Geneva Call in June 2014 to prohibit the use of children in fighting, their recruitment of children did not end as a result. The report documents at least 136 cases of child conscription carried out by the SDF since its establishment, with approximately 29 of these conscripted children subsequently killed on the battlefields. The report also documents that at least 11 schools were attacked by Syrian Democratic Forces as of November 20, 2021.
The report also includes the most notable violations committed by the Armed Opposition/ the Syrian National Army, noting that in addition to the killings and arbitrary detentions, the Armed Opposition Factions have exploited the poor living conditions children live under to conscript children into their forces. As the report reveals, nine children have been killed while participating with Armed Opposition factions in fighting on the battlefield. The report also documents that at least 35 schools were attacked by the Armed Opposition/ the Syrian National Army, as of November 20, 2021.
The report mentioned that the UN Secretary-General reports on children and armed conflict shows that Syria is the worst and one of the worst countries in the world with regard to several violations, and in this context the report included an analysis of the two reports issued in April 2021, and June 2021.
The report stresses that despite the vast arsenal of international laws on the rights of the child which aim to ensure they are protected at all times, violations of the right of children in Syria have not stopped for nearly nine years, and none of the parties to the conflict have respected these laws, including the Syrian regime which has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child; this ratification, however, failed to deter the regime from committing violations against children that amount to crimes against humanity through extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture, as well as war crimes through forced conscription.
The report adds that many of the violations committed by the other parties to the conflict against children may also constitute war crimes in the context of being committed against the background of the conflict, and widespread violations of international human rights law if they are committed against children in areas controlled by these forces.
The report recommends that the international community should protect and assist forcibly displaced children, including IDPs and refugees, especially girls, should take into account their specific needs, primarily for protection.
The report stresses the need to take all possible legal, political and financial measures against the Syrian regime and its allies, as well as against all perpetrators of violations in the Syrian conflict to pressure them to commit to respect the rights of children, to fulfill the commitment of pledged financial contributions, and to assist neighboring countries and provide all possible support to increase the level of education and healthcare in these countries which host the largest number of refugee children.
The report also calls on the international community to establish mechanisms to end the bombing of schools and protect it, and work to create a safe learning environment.
The report further recommends that humanitarian aid operations should be coordinated according to the areas worst affected, and should avoid bowing to pressure and blackmail by the Syrian regime which is working to harness aid to its advantage, and take into account the special needs of girls who have been directly affected by violations.
Top 10 Facts about Child Soldiers in Syria
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Child Soldiers, Refugees, Syria
During the Syrian conflict, children, even younger than 10, have been recruited into armed groups. These children are inadequately protected by the government and many are recruited into government and terrorist organizations. The majority of them are untrained but are placed in combat situations. Years of violence and despair have plagued the lives of these children.
In the text below, the top 10 facts about child soldiers in Syria are presented.
Top 10 Facts about Child Soldiers in Syria
- In a survey conducted by Save the Children, 59 percent of adults interviewed in Syria claimed to know children or young adults in Syria that had been recruited into armed groups. As of 2017, 910 children have been killed and 361 have been maimed during the Syrian conflict. Child soldiers in Syria have been used as human shields, suicide bombers, front-line soldiers and as guards at checkpoints.
- Between 2015 and 2016, the number of armed children in the Syrian civil war verified by the U.N. was 851, more than double from the year before. The incentives used to encourage children into the army are salaries, ideologies and family or community influence. Even girls join these armed groups and seek to escape either abuse or arranged marriages.
- Child soldiers are encouraged to join armed groups due to poverty or being consistently targeted by specific groups.
Some child soldiers in Syria have been reported to receive salaries of up to $400 a month. The families targeted by recruiters are typically poor and recruiters have been known to promise to pay and clothe children for their enlistment. - In Syria, ISIS had kidnapped 463 children in 2015. ISIS usually targets ethnic minority groups and women and children in their abductions. In 2015, it was believed that this organization has 3,500 slaves that were made up mostly of women and children.
- The U.N. verified 29 child soldiers in Syria associated with government forces. Although the government is not supposed to conscript child soldiers, they do sit anyway. The children in Syria have little protection from the government against armed groups recruitment.
- The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have recently issued an order that no one under the age of 18 is allowed to be enlisted into the army. This order requires commanders to verify the ages of soldiers and then take those under the age limit to authorities to end their enlistment.
It also calls for punishments for commanders who refuse to comply with this order. - Around 60 percent of the United Nation’s verified cases of child soldiers in Syria were associated with the Free Syrian Army. The Free Syrian Army is a rebel group formed by army deserters in Turkey. Several other armed groups across Syria have adopted their banner. A child interviewed by the Human Rights Watch stated that he joined the Free Syrian Army after he was previously tortured by the government forces.
- Children are actively being detained in Syria due to their perceived alliance with a specific group or organization. The U.N. verified that government forces had arrested 12 boys in 2016. Anti-government forces imprison children that are believed to support the government.
- There are 292,000 children trapped in besieged areas. The affected areas include Damascus, Idlib, Deir Az Zor and Homs. These areas have been besieged by both rebel and pro-government forces.
- Recently, the United Nations appealed to the U.S. for $8 billion of aid for Syria. The first part of the proposal aims to help refugees and the second part aims to provide humanitarian aid and protection for the 13.5 million people inside Syria.
These top 10 facts about child soldiers in Syria demonstrate the desperate crisis children in this country face every day. These are children who desperately need support in a fractured world, especially child soldiers that are affected most by the violence.
Investing in the future of this region and its children could have a large impact. Rehabilitation programs for child soldiers could help them reintegrate into society and into a normal life. These children could be placed into care centers or mandatory rehab programs to deal with the psychological and physical damage they have suffered.
Programs like these have worked in other conflicts and war situations and could help Syrian child soldiers find a way out of the violence they face every day and help them re-establish relationships with their families and communities as well.
– Olivia Halliburton
Photo: Flickr
https://borgenproject.org/wp-content/uploads/logo.jpg 0 0 Kim Thelwell https://borgenproject.org/wp-content/uploads/logo.jpg Kim Thelwell2018-11-06 01:30:432019-05-23 12:40:26Top 10 Facts about Child Soldiers in Syria“The Borgen Project is an incredible nonprofit organization that is addressing poverty and hunger and working towards ending them.”
90,000 Ten years of war in Syria: 12,000 children killed or injured 90,001 90,002 On the eve of a decade of conflict in Syria, UNICEF chief Henrietta Fore called on the international community to do everything to achieve peace and support the country's underage residents. “This date [ten years of conflict] should not be another sad frontier that the world will notice out of the corner of its eye and forget,” Fore said.
“Children and families in Syria are still in a terrible situation and need urgent help.” UNICEF reminds that over the past year, the cost of the consumer basket in Syria has increased by 230 percent; more than half a million children suffer from developmental delay due to chronic malnutrition; 2.5 million children in Syria and about 750,000 young Syrians living in neighboring countries do not go to school.
During the ten years of the conflict, according to only verified data, 12 thousand children were killed and wounded, more than 5.7 thousand were recruited into soldiers. In the past year, the number of children with symptoms of mental disorders has doubled - children witness violence and death, and are traumatized on a daily basis.
The situation is especially difficult in the north of the country, where millions of people huddle in tents, and many of them have survived several resettlements. Last winter was a real test for these Syrians, living without a roof over their heads, under torrential freezing rains and snow, surrounded by a mess of mud and ice.
Photo by UNICEF/H.Akach
Camp for internally displaced people in Syria. January 2021.
More than 75 percent of gross human rights violations in Syria have been recorded in the northwest of the country. It is in this area that the infamous Al-Hol camp is located, where at least 27.5 thousand children from 60 countries of the world live. UNICEF once again urges these countries to take care of their young citizens and find a long-term solution to this problem, in particular, to ensure their return to their homeland.
The number of Syrian refugee children taking refuge in neighboring countries has increased tenfold since 2012 to 2.5 million. In this regard, UNICEF expanded its operations in the region: about 900 thousand children are provided with vaccinations against measles and other infections, 400 thousand receive psychological support, 3.7 million receive assistance in the field of education, 5.4 million people are provided with clean water. The coronavirus awareness campaign reached more than 55 million people.
Funding is required for these and other UNICEF projects in Syria. This year, the Children's Fund has requested $1.4 billion for the needs of Syrian children.
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UNICEF is calling on parties to the conflict not to target children and civilian infrastructure, and is demanding an extension of the resolution to secure cross-border supplies. And children who have been forcibly placed under arms need help to successfully integrate into civilian life.
“Despite unimaginable challenges, the children and youth of Syria are showing extraordinary resilience,” said UNICEF Regional Director Ted Chaiban. “Their determination to learn, overcome obstacles and strive for a better future is admirable.”
(Un)Children's War
Almost no armed conflict in the countries of the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America takes place without the participation of child soldiers.
The civil war in Syria is no exception, according to a report by the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch.
The report immediately attracted the attention of major American media, which are again showing increased interest in the conflict in Syria due to its relationship with the events in neighboring Iraq and the aggravation of the situation in the area of the Syrian-Israeli border. HRW does not have exact figures on how many underage fighters are fighting in Syria - they are very difficult to obtain. At the same time, there is reliable data: in the two-year period, from 2011 to 2013, almost two hundred teenage soldiers died in the country. They were not killed as civilians, but as warriors, on the battlefield, emphasizes the author of the document, who lives in Cairo, an employee of Human Rights Watch Priyanka Motaparthi :
Syrian Free Army fighter and his subordinate - My work is based on interviews with twenty-five child soldiers, both former and current.
When talking with children, I always ask how many peers served in their unit. Some confidently answered: none. Others said that up to half of the unit's personnel were teenagers under the age of eighteen.
Human Rights Watch has the impression that the number of minors fighting in the resistance forces in Syria varies both by region and by which group they belong to:
- The Syrian conflict in the aspect that interests me is very different from the civil wars in Asia or on the African continent. There, children are often kidnapped and forced to fight. In Syria, teenagers mostly go to fight voluntarily. The pressure sometimes manifests itself only in the fact that they are agitated to join the ranks of the resistance units. We have not seen cases of forced conscription, at least until the recent incident when the fundamentalist group ISIS abducted more than a hundred Kurdish schoolchildren near Aleppo and is reportedly beating and brainwashing them into fighting. But, as a rule, Syrian teenagers still make such decisions on their own.
In Syria, teenagers mostly go to fight voluntarily
In report , Priyanka Motaparti writes that sometimes children in Syria join the partisans following their relatives: are their fathers, older brothers, other relatives or close friends. Examples of such family continuity are most common in groups of moderate orientation. Other teenagers join the armed opposition for ideological reasons. This is true mainly for radical groups. And sometimes they go to war simply because they want to appear to themselves and those around them as adults and strong, and they join precisely those groups that seem to them to be the most successful, says the author of the Human Rights Watch report Priyanka Motaparthi .
In Africa and Asia, warlords do not "discriminate" children on the basis of sex, and recruit boys and girls equally as soldiers. In Syria, this is not the case: according to Human Rights Watch, only Kurds “conscript” girls there, and they are not used in combat units, but only in sentry guards or as nurses.
Similarly, unlike in Africa and Asia, it is not young children who are fighting in Syria, but mostly teenagers from fifteen to eighteen years old. According to international conventions, they are still children, but, as Priyanka Motaparthi , recruiting children under fifteen as soldiers is no longer just a violation of convention, but a pure war crime:
– In the course of writing the report, we found that radical militias such as ISIS or the al-Nusra Front promise free education to children as bait. This technique works well in communities where school buildings have been bombed or where teachers have fled for fear of punishment by fundamentalists for allowing girls to attend classes. In a number of cases, fundamentalists seized schools and expelled secular teachers from them, or took children to their bases, where the study of the Koran went hand in hand with military training. One way or another, all this is happening in places where the normal school system has ceased to function.
Both ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, according to Human Rights Watch, prepare children not so much for military operations as for suicide, as a sacred feat. The use of child soldiers is not only the fault of the insurgents, but also of the government army, continues Priyanka Motaparthi :
– We have quite reliable reports that the pro-government militias recruit children into their ranks, but these cases are not documented in this report . We had neither the time nor the resources to conduct a survey in areas where the government army operates. But, I repeat: Human Rights Watch has great confidence in the available information, and this issue will undoubtedly be reflected in our subsequent work.
Pro-government militias accept children into their ranks, but these cases are not documented in this report in the country could have been avoided. The same logic holds true for the use of child soldiers, Priyanka Motaparthi emphasizes: this practice could have been ended long ago if Syrian teenagers today, as they did two years ago, went predominantly to centrist groups such as the Syrian National coalition" whose commanders are sensitive to criticism from the West and with whom it would therefore be relatively easy to agree that they do not put minors under arms.
