A recent United Nations report shows that both pro-government forces and rebels in Syria have been actively recruiting children to fight in the civil war.
Children routinely participate as common soldiers, snipers, and spies both for and against the regime. According to reports, Syrian children began actively fighting in the war in November 2012. Since 2012 the Violations Documenting Center, a Syrian monitoring group, has documented the deaths of 194 child soldiers.
Interviews with the child soldiers have brought to light that all groups, from moderates to extremists, had been recruiting child soldiers to their fight. Both al-Nusra (a violent al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have been attracting youth by offering free lectures and schooling, while others have joined because their family members had joined previously.
Children were originally also recruited to the Kurdish forces, the Syrian National Council, and the Bashar al-Assad regime, but these groups have publicly stated their aim to end the practice. In 2013, Assad issued a law punishing those who recruited children for combat with 10–20 years of penal labor. In January 2014, the Kurdish groups acted to demobilize child soldiers. More recently, in March 2014, the coalition groups supported by the Free Syrian Army announced a new policy for the training of the army “members in International Humanitarian Law to eliminate the recruitment and participation of children in armed conflict.” Such commitments are important, but as long as the conflict continues, Syrian children and the Syrian people will face a grim future.
Since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, children have suffered enormously. Syrian children have been killed, maimed, and made refugees; many lack access to education and basic health care services, while also seeing their families torn apart or murdered. Of the 22 million Syrian people, 5.5 million Syrian children have already been affected by the conflict, and over 1 million now live as refugees in the region. For many Syrian children, the situation only worsens as they are recruited to fight in the conflict.
In fact, the humanitarian crisis resulting from the Syrian civil war has been labeled as the worst since the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Heritage senior fellow James Phillips predicts that the conflict will create an anarchic patchwork of warring fiefdoms in Syria. As the conflict continues to spiral out of control and destabilize portions of Iraq, the future of Syrian children and communities in the region continues to worsen.
Lauren Aragon is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please click here.
