SyriaSyrian children conscripted into combat, dying on battlefields: UNICEF
Children under 15 conscripted into combat roles with others killed or maimed in attacks that have destroyed thousands of schools, the UN said. The Middle East regional director of UNICEF also said that water was being used as a weapon of war. Last summer, the Assad regime cut the water supply to the 2.1 million people of Aleppo more than forty times in an effort to weaken the rebel-supporting Sunni population of the city. The practice had just started again.
Peter Salama, the regional director of UNICEF in the Middle East, said Syrian children are increasingly being conscripted into combat roles and being killed on the battlefield.
Salama was in London ahead of an early February meeting on the Syrian humanitarian crisis. He told reporters that several hundred children had been conscripted last year, and as many as 400 children had been killed, some in combat.
The Guardian reports that Salama noted that UNICEF had identified forty-seven specific attacks on schools last year, and more than 4,000 assaults of some kind on school property since the Syrian crisis started nearly five years ago.
“We are seeing children killed and maimed in schools and playgrounds by all parties to the conflict,” he said.
He said the deeply troubling trend probably reflected just the tip of an iceberg.
“In the past, children over 16 have been involved in the military in non-combat roles, but we are seeing a very different pattern today,” Salama said. “It is one of the most insidious trends in Syria.
“The majority of those children are now under the age of 15, which is a very different pattern to previously. The majority are now in combat roles being used on the front lines, and the majority are forced to join, often abducted. They are being used as uninformed armed checkpoints, and sometimes as forced labor.”
Salama also said that water was being used as a weapon of war. He said the water supply to the 2.1 million people of Aleppo had been cut forty times last summer, mostly deliberately, and that the practice had just started again.
Salama said: “We now have 2.8 million children out of school in Syria and surrounding countries. For many children, they have never been in school in the past five years and so for many primary schoolchildren, they have never seen the inside of a schoolroom.
“This is a country that had more than 90 percent attendance rates before the start of the civil war. Nearly a fifth of children going to school have to cross a front line to get to school to do their exams. Nearly 50,000 teachers have gone missing, and a full quarter of schools — more than 6,000 — are out of action for education either because they have been destroyed, damaged irreparably, used by the military or used for internally displaced people.”
The Guardian quotes Salama to say that the crisis is now affecting a whole generation, and that nearly a third of refugees now reaching Europe are children.
