Syria’s child soldiers

Children’s participation in the conflict has grown in frequency and in method of involvement.

“Ibrahim," who says he is 18, but looks much younger, smiles as he passes me his battered cell phone, insisting that I watch yet another video. The grainy footage shows a young Syrian soldier laying flat on the pavement, his head dangling into the road. Several men hold his limbs while one grabs his hair, raising a large knife to his throat to decapitate him. As blood streams onto the tarmac, the executioner turns to face the camera as he tosses the severed head into the air. Shouts and smiles from nearby spectators ensue. 

In the next clip, several men lie on their stomachs in a line, hands behind their heads. The cameraman walks to and fro in front of them, pausing to zoom in on their faces. The prisoners, many of whom look to be in their early 20s or less, beg for their lives. They are from the same town as their captors, they say, which makes them brothers. “It doesn’t matter,” says someone off camera. “You tried to kill us, now we will kill you.” Moments later a fighter walks along the row, casually shooting each man in the back of the head and spraying the last victim with a few extra bullets. The onlookers watch disinterestedly. For them, the process has become routine. “What do you think?” asks Ibrahim, unmoved by the violence. He adds, proudly, that the killings were the work of Ahrar Al-Sham, the Islamist Syrian revolutionary group he says he has been fighting with.

There are many more videos. One shows a battle in which a friend, says Ibrahim, steps out from under cover as he wildly fired his light machine gun. He was promptly shot in the head by a regime sniper. The last video, saved as a finale, shows Ibrahim himself lying in a makeshift field hospital, freshly wounded and covered in blood.

It was these injuries that brought him to the Turkish border town of Reyhanli - where he waited, smoking and clutching a battered plastic bag containing x-rays of his shrapnel-filled leg for a bus to nearby Antakya. There, Ibrahim said, he planned to find a job in order to save up enough money to return to Syria and fight once again.

Both Ibrahim and his younger cousin “Ahmed” claim to have “graduated from the battlefield.” They are not the only ones. Opposition brigades have used children as young as 14 in non-combat roles, including transporting weapons and supplies and acting as lookouts. According to research released last year from Human Rights Watch, people as young as 16 have taken direct part in the fighting. The problem has only worsened since, says Priyanka Motaparthy, a children’s rights researcher with Human Rights Watch and author of a report on that topic. “In the early part of fall 2012, we didn’t find many cases of children actually serving in combat roles.  But as the conflict escalated, we began to see children picking up guns and taking part in attacks, as well as serving as snipers or in other combat functions.”

Motaparthy says that in the early days of the revolution, children’s involvement with opposition groups tended to be family-linked, whereby all male relatives would join a unit together, even if some were under 18. However, as Syria has descended into a full-blown civil war, the trend appears to have moved beyond blood ties. “I no longer get the sense that it is a case of children tagging along with family members,” she says. ”Now we see orphans, children who have lost everything, connecting with opposition units because of a desire for revenge or because they have very few other options.”

Age aside, many of these recruits are woefully ill-equipped for combat roles. Ibrahim, for example, received little or no training before being thrown into battle. “They just gave me a gun, and told me where to go,” he says, adding with a grin that he had managed to injure a regime soldier. The desperate need for manpower on the frontlines means that this is unlikely to be an isolated occurrence, says Motaparthy.

The Syrian National Coalition has attempted to reduce or stop the use of child soldiers in the course of its workshops, held in conjunction with a humanitarian organization called Geneva Call. A spokesperson for the coalition told NOW that the brigades which participated in the workshop – generally one of the largest in each region - had agreed on a resolution prohibiting children under the age of 16 from joining any part of the Free Syrian Army. They also agreed on requiring that people aged 16-18 should not be involved in military activities, but could help instead by “providing food to the soldiers or working in their media office.”

How this will play out in the midst of a devastating civil war - which, according to UNICEF estimates, has already affected more than 2 million children across the region remains to be seen. But as the fierce fighting rages on, atrocities will continue and more families will be torn apart. It’s almost certain that there will be many more like Ibrahim.