Syria's Children
"I feel like I'm still a child and would love to go back to school but I feel like I have to work hard to put food on the table for my family."
Ahmed, 12, Syria
"[Displaced Syrian children are] attending to the wounded or recording battles for propaganda purposes. Other children work as guards or at checkpoints."
"Children have also been employed as suicide bombers [with Islamist militias]."
UNICEF and Save the children report: Small Hands, Heavy Burden
"We left the hospital and I was holding Mummy’s hand and the soldier picked me up and we ran away. Hashem was martyred. Mummy was wounded. Both of them were martyred."
5-year-old Sahar Qanbar lost her mother and brother as civilians and government soldiers fought side by side after being surrounded by brutal Islamist fighters, Latakia, The Independent
A report on education from the UN affiliated Institute for Statistics, in Montreal released data showing that Syria fifteen years ago had universal enrolment in primary schools with literacy rates of over 90 percent. The Syria of today after four years of civil strife and a government that sees fit to attack its own people with barrel bombs, chemical weapons and helicopter gunships no longer has one third of its youngest children in classrooms, nor half of its adolescent population.Syrian refugee children fare even worse, with 90 percent having no opportunities to attend school. The children cannot attend schools that no longer exist. But they're not exactly totally idle; many of them work. Syrian children living in refugee camps have become accustomed to hard labour to help supplement family incomes when basic goods elude absolute needs. The World Food Program states it is close to $200-million short of funding to feed Syrian refugees in the short term.
In Syria, the unemployment rate is close to 60 percent, making it an imperative that close to three-quarters of children living in Syria have little option but to contribute to family income; almost half of those living in refugee camps. The report lists children as young as eight recycling newspapers for a daily $3 wage. Children over ten work at cleaning up diesel spills. "I hate the diesel market and the clothes that I wear there. All of it makes me sick", stated 13-year-old Khalid.
These children are, if you will, legitimately employed. Other children work in toxic factories, pick potatoes or beg on the street for lack of any other type of employment. Those most desperately unfortunate are sold into child prostitution rings. Not to mention recruitment into militias where a child could be promised $400 monthly for linking with a paramilitary group.
Human rights groups have duly documented the actions of President Bashar al-Assad's regime in arresting, imprisoning children and torturing them as a political response to the civil war; if they are Sunni they must be enemies regardless of age, to the Shiite Alawite Baathist regime. The children are then deserving of being subjected to chemical weapons, barrel bombs, displacement and starvation, along with their families.
Labels: Atrocities, Child Abuse, Civil War, Islamism, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 07, 2015
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