Syrian children and women refugees: Easy targets, hard future

A row of Syrian refugee children smile as they listen closely to their lesson

With more than one million refugees in Lebanon alone, Syrian families who fled to escape the war in their country are facing another one. It is a war with different weapons that sometimes look worse and bitter. Some will find it an easier escape to scarify their own lives, as did mother Mariam al-Khawli, when she could not find what to feed her four children, nor what to pay for the house rent.
According to the UN refugee agency’s conditions, Mariam, like 25 per cent of the registered refugees in Lebanon, did not qualify to be covered by the international agency office in Tripoli anymore. That is why she, on March 25, set herself on fire.

Almost 2,300 refugees per day are flooding to Lebanon, the small country of 4.4 million. According to the UN appeal, Lebanon’s humanitarian support needs for 2014 is $1.8 billion, but only 14 percent was funded! The head of the UN refugee agency in Lebanon, Ninette Kelley, said that aid agencies have little choice but to focus on the neediest. International aid groups say that hundreds of Syrian children who have fled the war in their country are facing death by starvation at refugee camps in Lebanon.

Announced by the UN children’s agency UNICEF, and other agencies, almost 10,000 Syrian children under the age of five living in Lebanon are suffering from acute malnutrition, with 1,800 of them at risk of dying and requiring immediate help to survive.

Syrian refugee children walk near their tents at Al-Zaatri Syrian refugee camp, at the north east city of Mafraq Jordan on 11 September 2012.

No school, no home

News resources say there are over 300,000 new Syrian school-age children, which is the same number of Lebanese children who were registered at Lebanese schools last year. And while the Ministry of Education has indicated they could absorb 100,000 in the formal education system, it still leaves over 200,000 without a formal education option.

UNICEF’s representative in Lebanon, Annamaria Laurini, called malnutrition “a new silent threat among refugees in Lebanon.” She said it was linked to poor hygiene, unsafe drinking water, lack of immunizations and improper feeding practices in young children. Officials say malnutrition first affects the brain, leaving children without any appetite, and that those under five are especially vulnerable. UNICEF says that nearly 5.5 million children in Syria and neighboring countries are now affected by the fighting that has lasted for almost four years.

Palestinian women in Lebanon, who are long-term refugees, understand the problems faced by women who have fled the Syrian civil war. They share similar hardships and also contend with domestic abuse as well as sexual exploitation.

Such women are living in exile in camps amid rising insecurity. Contending with economic hardship is bad enough, but there is also a heavy toll on their family lives with an increase in domestic abuse. More than 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, half of them in a dozen camps spread across the country. Never easy, camp life has become much harder since the civil war erupted in neighboring Syria.

A high incidence of sexual abuse and exploitation is raised by male relatives and neighbors among the Syrian refugees, who mostly live in a confined ”tent city” within Ain el-Hilweh. The problems of domestic and sexual abuse among refugee communities in Lebanon are of mounting concern to international and local NGOs, which are trying to develop strategies to help.

Al-Qaida linked Jihadists in insurgent-held areas in northern and eastern Syria are targeting children as young as four years old and teenagers for indoctrination by conducting teach-ins, opening schools and training camps, say human rights activists. The goal of opposition activists, psychologists warn is a determined effort by al-Qaida to produce a new generation of fighters, who will prove highly intractable and may turn out even more fanatical than the previous generation of al-Qaida adherents.

Rehabilitation of children recruited as child soldiers at very young ages is notoriously difficult, according to therapists who have worked on treatment projects in Africa and the Middle East. “The Jihadists are trying to create a new pool of suicide bombers,” says psychotherapist Mohamed Khalil of the London-based Arab Foundation for Care of Victims of War and Torture. “You can influence children very easily,” he says. “They give these lost children in the middle of war an identity and prestige, telling them they are mature now and men. They saturate them with Jihadist thinking and in effect brainwash them. They are co-opting them into a way of life that will be hard to shake off later.”

Jihadists’ victims, suicide bombers

As appeared in recent online videos on Jihadist forums of Syrian children and teenagers undergoing Jihadist instruction demonstrates the scale of the indoctrination and the effort expended on training and recruitment in the middle of the war. The videos supply “marketing” material for al-Qaida and their sympathizers to propagate via the Internet Jihadist thinking to children and teenagers beyond Syria in Europe and the Gulf.

One video posted to a Jihadist website shows a four-year-old child being taught by foreign fighters from al-Qaida offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, commonly known as ISIS, to fire an AK47 assault rifle. In the video, the child says he was born in Uzbekistan and explains he has been given the same name as ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Jihadists surrounding him appear to come from Gulf countries, judging by their accents.

The video using the header “a message from one of the cubs of ISIS” was monitored by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit. Increasingly over the past decade, al-Qaida and its affiliates and sympathizers have been focusing their outreach and recruitment efforts at pre-teens, and even much younger children, according to the institute.

Al-Qaida-affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra has a parallel indoctrination and recruitment effort underway also and is overseeing its own training camps in Syria. A February 6 video monitored by MEMRI of the “Cubs of Jabhat al-Nusra” shows a large group of children attending a Jihadist sharia school. Pulling up to the school in a bus, the children chant, “[Oh] our youth, come to the battles… [and let] the arrogant [and] stubborn fall. Tomorrow, tomorrow, we implement the law of our God, and the unbelieving idol shall fall.”

Those easy targets of war, children, are not only affected by the misery they face, but will also be suicide bombers of any kind of peaceful future. It is the world’s mission to find solutions as fast as possible, as it is not only the problem of Syrian refugees, but the dilemma of the region and world’s future, as well.