Armed Conflict CRINmail 186:
Spotlight on Syria
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Since the start of the anti-government protests in 2011, which led to an internal armed conflict between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and those opposed to his rule, at least 190,000 Syrians have lost their lives, more than 10,000 of them children.
The conflict has forced more than nine million people from their homes, almost 2.5 million of whom have found refuge in neighbouring countries, creating the worst refugee crisis in the last 20 years.
The violence hasn’t spared children at any point. On Wednesday 5 November, a school in the town of Qaboun was shelled, killing at least 13 children.
Read the historical background
The pan-Arab Baath (Renaissance) party took control of the country in 1963 and still rules to this day.
The first report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (November 2011), established by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in the country, explains that:
“During the past four decades, suspected opponents of the Government have suffered torture, detention and long prison sentences imposed under vaguely defined crimes relating to political activity. Surveillance and suppression has been conducted by an extensive apparatus of intelligence, the mukhabarat. Decades of tight control of freedom of expression, as well as surveillance and persecution of opponents, have severely limited political life and the constitution of an autonomous civil society.”
Many hoped that the human rights situation would improve in 2000 when Bashar al-Assad became president. Instead, the new president focused his efforts on opening up the economy and continued to rule by emergency powers.
Human Rights Watch reported in 2010 that “Syria’s security agencies, the feared mukhabarat, continue to detain people without arrest warrants, frequently refuse to disclose their whereabouts for weeks and sometimes months, and regularly engage in torture. Special courts set up under Syria’s emergency laws, such as the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC), sentence people following unfair trials.”
Read a summary of the internal conflict from the uprising in 2011 to the descent into civil war.
The conflict’s patterns of violence and destruction have had a deep impact on children. In March 2014, UNICEF estimated that 5.5 million children are directly affected by the crisis and need humanitarian assistance, which amounts to 56 percent of all Syrian children.
Involvement of children
The 2012 annual report of the UN Secretary-General (SG) on children and armed conflict to the Security Council included Syrian government forces and their allied Shabiha militia for the first time as parties that violate international standards on children and armed conflict. "In almost all recorded cases, children were among the victims of military operations by government forces, including the Syrian armed forces, the intelligence forces and the Shabiha militia, in their ongoing conflict with the opposition, including the Free Syrian Army," the report says.
Since then, the SG added five armed groups to the list of parties committing grave violations of children’s rights. According to the the Report of the Secretary-General to the Security Council issued on 15 May 2014, all the groups listed actively recruit and use children for logistics, handling ammunition, manning checkpoints and as combatants. Reports indicate that the recruitment of children or pressure to join armed groups also occur among refugee populations in neighbouring countries. Government forces and armed groups continue to kill and maim children; more than 10,000 children are estimated to have been killed since the outset of the conflict.
According to the report, adults and children released from detention relayed that children were still present in detention facilities and suffered treatment that amounts to torture.
Sexual abuse of boys and girls in government-controlled detention has been documented. Government forces also reportedly abducted young women and girls in groups at checkpoints or on the roads and released them a few days later in their village, intentionally exposing them as victims of rape and subjecting them to rejection by their families. The SG also received allegations of sexual violence against boys and girls by armed groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra. Read more in the SG’s report.
Attacks on education
A total of 4,000 schools have been destroyed or are being used as temporary housing. This contributes to the situation of 2.8 million Syrian children who are either out of school or are at high risk of dropping out of school.
In June 2013, a report by Human Rights Watch documented the use of schools for military purposes by both sides. It also describes how teachers and state security agents interrogated and beat students for alleged anti-government activity, and how security forces and shabiha (pro-government militias) assaulted peaceful student demonstrations. In several instances reported to Human Rights Watch, government forces fired on school buildings that were not being used for military purposes.
The refugee crisis
According to the UN refugee agency, as of January 2014, 6,520,800 persons were internally displaced in Syria and more than 2,468,000 have found refuge in neighbouring countries, 1.3 million of them are children. Only around 140,000 refugees returned home since the start of the conflict.
Neighbouring countries have borne the brunt of the refugee crisis, with Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey struggling to accommodate the flood of new arrivals. The exodus has accelerated dramatically since the start of 2013, as conditions in Syria have deteriorated drastically.
Trapped civilians
According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), deliberate siege of the civilian population has been a persistent feature of the Syrian conflict. “Millions [...] have been stuck in highly dangerous and deprived environments.”
The Commission of Inquiry formally acknowledged in 2013 that “siege warfare has entered the arsenal of the parties to the conflict”. It noted that siege was being used deliberately “to trap civilians in their homes by controlling the supply of food, water, medicine and electricity”, and that starvation and the denial of humanitarian relief was being used as a weapon of war in breach of International Humanitarian Law.
Sources
Read the full report
Sudanese troops have denied access to the joint UN and African Union peacekeeping mission, UNAMID, to a town in the country’s western Darfur region to investigate reports of an alleged mass rape of about 200 women and girls.
The victims were collectively raped in their village on the evening of 31 October, reportedly by Sudanese soldiers belonging to a military garrison in North Darfur.
The commander of the soldiers admitted that his men committed the mass rape and acknowledged that they beat and humiliated the men. The villagers have rejected his apology and are asking for the creation of an independent investigation into the crime, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Also in Darfur, last month an internal UN review found that UNAMID had failed to provide the UN headquarters in New York with full reports on attacks against civilians and peacekeepers. The review had been ordered in response to media reports alleging that UNAMID intentionally covered up details of deadly attacks.
Around 120 people have been killed in various parts of Beni during a series of attacks attributed to members of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel Ugandan armed group.
On the night of 15 October, 30 people were hacked to death mostly with machetes. In another massacre, at least 22 people were killed with machetes, axes and hoes, eight of them were children.
Since 1995 ADF has been active in the mountainous terrain around Beni and frequently engages in massacres, looting and forcible conscription of local people.
Two children died and four were wounded when an artillery shell hit a school playing field as they played football in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.
Despite repeated violations and hundreds of deaths, the ceasefire signed on 5 September is still in force.
The area around Donetsk airport has seen some of the worst violence in the weeks since the ceasefire was declared.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) carried out their third massacre of Iraqi Sunnis in four days, shooting dead 50 people, including four children, from the al-Bunimr tribe as punishment for resisting their Islamist insurgency.
In the latest attack, which brings to at least 322 the number of al-Bunimr members killed by ISIL in two weeks, the victims were lined up and shot in public.
At least 1,273 people were killed in Iraq in October and a further 2010 injured in what the UN described as "acts of terrorism and violence", warning that these figures must be considered the "absolute minimum" toll.
According to a new report by Human Rights Watch, Boko Haram, Nigeria’s homegrown Islamist insurgency, has abducted at least 500 women and girls from northern Nigeria since 2009 and has perpetrated numerous human rights abuses against them in captivity.
The report, based on field research, including interviews with victims and witnesses of abduction, documents the abduction of women and girls by Boko Haram, highlighting the harrowing experiences of some of the abducted women and girls.
The victims appear to have been targeted either because of their presumed religious affiliation or for attending western-styled schools. Some of the victims were threatened with death if they refused to convert to Islam.
The women and girls told Human Rights Watch that for refusing to convert to Islam, they and many others they saw in the camps were subjected to physical and psychological abuse; forced labour; forced participation in military operations, including carrying ammunition or luring men into ambush; forced marriage to their captors; and sexual abuse, including rape. Download the report.
The UN has warned that fresh fighting in the Central African Republic (CAR) has aggravated the humanitarian situation across the country.
Thousands of people are estimated to have been killed and 2.2 million need humanitarian aid in a conflict which erupted when mainly Muslim Séléka rebels launched attacks in December 2012. The violence has since taken on increasingly sectarian overtones.
According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children were affected by the violence and, in the most recent rounds of fighting in the country’s capital of Bangui, six children had died, including two who were “brutally killed” after being accused of spying.
Once one of the only countries willing to accept unaccompanied children seeking refuge in Europe, the UK announced last week that it will not support any future search and rescue operations to prevent migrants and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. The UK claims such operations simply encourage more people to attempt the dangerous sea crossing, according to Foreign Office ministers.
Refugee and human rights organisations said that this decision would contribute to more people dying needlessly on Europe’s doorstep.
While the UK announced their decision, Czech authorities honoured Sir Nicholas Winton, known as the ‘British Schindler’. When he was 29, Sir Nicholas put his life in great danger to provide safe-passage to 669 children, most of them Jews, out of Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia.
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Closing
Data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which aims to identify those killed in CIA drone strikes on Pakistan since 2011, was published on 26 October. To date, their project has named 704 of an estimated 2,379 killed by US drone strike in Pakistan. Of the 704 named dead, 322 are reportedly civilians of which 99 are children, and 295 are alleged militants. Eighty-seven are classified as unknown.
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