Tribune. While we begin our tenth year of investigations and reports on the serious human rights violations committed in Syria, we remain deeply upset by the fate of Syrian children. The majority of these children have only known the conflict and its tragedies, and the list of children who are victims of bombing and air strikes continues to grow. Children grew up in a state of siege, facing death and famine, and their most basic needs are flouted.
Millions of children go out in camps of displaced with revolting living conditions. Children have been arbitrarily detained, victims of torture and sexual violence, nourishing the covetousness of traffickers who marry the girls of strength and enlist the boys as child soldiers. More than half of Syria’s children are deprived of elemental education. Thousands are imprisoned, often detained among adults.
While we write these lines, the children of Deraa Al Balad in southern Syria lived several months of siege, some were killed in bombing, other IDPs from the north of the country or have FUI towards the Jordanian border. In northwestern Syria, 1.8 million children desperately need humanitarian aid.
A glacial contempt of “the best interest of the child”
The parties to the Syrian conflict, only guided by military and political objectives, shall simply show icy contempt for “the best interests of the child”, as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Rights ‘child. More striking, the countries including minor nationals languish in Syria, and who would be required to assist them in order to end their calvary, also refuse or rehabilitate protecting the rights of the child.
According to estimates, nearly 40,000 children are held, with their mothers if they are not orphans, within al-hol and other camps close to the Iraqi border in Northeast Syrian. Nearly half of them are Iraqi, and 7,800 children come from about 60 other countries. Most of these children are under 12 years old.
They are not accused of any crime, yet held in terrible conditions, deprived of their rights to education, to play, as well as decent medical care. Once adolescents, boys incur the risk of being separated from their mothers and transferred to detention centers. These already have 500 foreign boys, detained among the adults suspected of having fought for the Islamic state, at the risk of perpetuating the cycle of indoctrination, radicalization, and inhuman treatment.
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