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As One Million Child Refugees Flee Syria, a Glimpse into Their Lives
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Brad Sylvester23 hours agoPolitics & GovernmentSyriaUnited Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesUNICEF
Half a world away from Syria, with information fed through sound bites by the evening news and interpreted by politicians and pundits, it's easy to think the faces of the Syrian civil war belong to President Bashar al-Assad, his military forces, and a rag-tag cadre of freedom fighters with widely varying ideological goals.
As with most wars, however, the real faces and stories of the Syrian conflict belong to the children and families unlucky enough to get caught up in others' violence.
On Friday, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees and UNICEF, the one millionth child refugee fled Syria since the uprising began in March 2011.
This comes just two days after the White House expressed "deep concern" over the alleged use of chemical weapons near Damascus and called for unrestricted access to the site for UN investigators. Reuters quoted sources in Syria who estimated 500 to 1,000 dead by poison gas used by the Assad regime.
For perspective, one million children is roughly equivalent to all the children of Boston and Los Angeles combined. These children stream across the Syrian border daily, leaving their homes, schools, friends, and everything they've ever known to seek one thing: safety.
According to UNICEF and the UNHCR, 740,000 of those children are younger than 11, and 3,500 children so far have arrived in Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq from Syria without their parents.
As the conflict rages into its third year, according to the UNHCR and UNICEF, the civil war has killed 7,000 children inside the country. (The Violations Documentation Center in Syria puts the number at 7,400.) Anthony Lake, UNICEF's executive director, said it's important to see beyond the numbers. Every child, he said, is "a real child ripped from home, maybe even from a family, facing horrors we can only begin to comprehend."
Once refugees register with the UNHCR in Jordan, they are required to stay in the Za'atari camp, spokeswoman Reem Alsalem said in an interview this week. But, she noted, "About 70 percent of the 617,000 refugees that are registered in Jordan live in the cities among Jordanians."
The Za'atari camp is located in the desert just across the southern border of Syria and about 46 miles north of Amman, Jordan. "Before the camp was built," Alsalem said, "it was a god-forsaken place."
Raed, a 17-year-old refugee, has spent 15 months in Amman after fleeing Syria with his parents and three siblings. His story is not unusual.
"In Homs," he told the UNHCR, "we used to lead a very good life. We had a very nice house. My father owned his own shop for spare parts. We tried to remain in Homs, but then the shelling started to increase day by day. One day, a small missile hit our roof... The next day, a big shell hit our neighbor's house. The woman was killed and her children lost their legs. It was then that my parents decided that we needed to leave."
Even before the shelling began, Raed said, "The Syrian army would also come into our house every now and then looking for weapons. Thank God they never arrested my father. He is not with the opposition, but that in itself does not mean much, as they are also taking away people that are not with the opposition.
"When we left our house, we moved to my grandmother's house on the opposite street. We stayed there for a month in better and calmer conditions, but then that area also started to become restless. So we knew we had to leave.
"We decided to … come to Jordan… because the security situation in Lebanon is not very good. Also if you are a Sunni in Hezbollah-controlled territories you are in trouble. I do not think we can return any time soon to Syria. My grandmother [who stayed behind in Syria] says there are a lot of curfews and arrests and a lot of killing. The other day we heard of two cars that picked up a 17-year-old girl from the street and she disappeared."
Other refugee children told similar stories to the UNHCR. Most, Absalem said, leave Syria with their savings: "If they had a house, a car or a business, they try to sell those things before leaving the country, and they live on those savings for the first few months or weeks, depending upon how much they had." Others don't get the chance to sell what's left of their house.
Aya, a young refugee in Lebanon told the UNHCR, "We were in the house when they bombed our house, and we cried so many times. Then we came here to Lebanon."
Ahmed, a 14-year-old refugee who has spent a year at the Za'atari camp shared his story: "My brother has been killed and my sister has received a brain injury. We thought we could not bring her here at first, but in the end we brought her and my brother here in an ambulance. We ended up burying him here."
Iman, an 11-year-old who is already a 10-month veteran of the Za'atari refugee camp, recalled: "The principal told us the army was planning on occupying our school… During those days we would see rockets flying directly over us, and we were trying to hide from them. That's when my uncle suggested that we leave for Za'atari… Here we can go to sleep in peace and never worry about the shelling, but sometimes we hear fireworks and we think we are being attacked again, but we're just imagining it because of everything we've been through."
Now Za'atari holds an estimated 120,000 refugees and is the fifth largest city in Jordan. To keep the refugees alive and healthy, Alsalem said, 3.5 million liters of water are trucked to the camp every day. The Jordanian military, along with relief agencies, provide at least three field hospitals, at least seven health facilities, schools, and even soccer fields so that Za'atari has many of the facilities of a real city. But still, to the refugee children and their families, it isn't home.
After two years, the Syrian refugees keep arriving. In the last 10 days, according to the UN refugee agency, another 30,000 Syrians fled northern Syria into Iraq. UNHCR spokesman Dan McNorton said that many refugees in this latest surge reported that they were fleeing aerial bombardments, ground fighting and rising tensions among factions across northern Syria. As with other waves of Syrian refugees, about half are children.
"What is at stake," UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres said, "is nothing less than the survival and well-being of a generation of innocents… Even after they have crossed a border to safety, they are traumatized, depressed and in need of a reason for hope."
Raed, the 17-year-old refugee from a solid, entrepreneurial family in Syria, is a prime example. "When I think of the future," he said, "I see it all black. I have lost several friends back in Syria who were killed in the conflict. I do not know what will become of me or my life. Living here is not easy, but going back seems to be impossible."
The refugee children, in their interviews with UNHCR, did not express a desire for one side or the other to win the conflict. It seemed irrelevant. Their wishes centered on a desire for normalcy.
Jana, a 9-year-old in Za'atari, said, "All I wish is that Syria could become peaceful again. That's all I want, for the trouble to stop… I hope everything goes back to normal."
"I want to return to Syria to live in peace and go back to school. I want to play with my old friends again, just like before," Ibrahim, 9, said. "I want our country to be safe, safe enough to live in, and for it to be prosperous again."
More information is at supportunicef.org or the UNHCR's Syrian refugee crisis page.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Brad Sylvester23 hours agoPolitics & GovernmentSyriaUnited Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesUNICEF
Half a world away from Syria, with information fed through sound bites by the evening news and interpreted by politicians and pundits, it's easy to think the faces of the Syrian civil war belong to President Bashar al-Assad, his military forces, and a rag-tag cadre of freedom fighters with widely varying ideological goals.
As with most wars, however, the real faces and stories of the Syrian conflict belong to the children and families unlucky enough to get caught up in others' violence.
On Friday, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees and UNICEF, the one millionth child refugee fled Syria since the uprising began in March 2011.
This comes just two days after the White House expressed "deep concern" over the alleged use of chemical weapons near Damascus and called for unrestricted access to the site for UN investigators. Reuters quoted sources in Syria who estimated 500 to 1,000 dead by poison gas used by the Assad regime.
For perspective, one million children is roughly equivalent to all the children of Boston and Los Angeles combined. These children stream across the Syrian border daily, leaving their homes, schools, friends, and everything they've ever known to seek one thing: safety.
According to UNICEF and the UNHCR, 740,000 of those children are younger than 11, and 3,500 children so far have arrived in Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq from Syria without their parents.
As the conflict rages into its third year, according to the UNHCR and UNICEF, the civil war has killed 7,000 children inside the country. (The Violations Documentation Center in Syria puts the number at 7,400.) Anthony Lake, UNICEF's executive director, said it's important to see beyond the numbers. Every child, he said, is "a real child ripped from home, maybe even from a family, facing horrors we can only begin to comprehend."
Once refugees register with the UNHCR in Jordan, they are required to stay in the Za'atari camp, spokeswoman Reem Alsalem said in an interview this week. But, she noted, "About 70 percent of the 617,000 refugees that are registered in Jordan live in the cities among Jordanians."
The Za'atari camp is located in the desert just across the southern border of Syria and about 46 miles north of Amman, Jordan. "Before the camp was built," Alsalem said, "it was a god-forsaken place."
Raed, a 17-year-old refugee, has spent 15 months in Amman after fleeing Syria with his parents and three siblings. His story is not unusual.
"In Homs," he told the UNHCR, "we used to lead a very good life. We had a very nice house. My father owned his own shop for spare parts. We tried to remain in Homs, but then the shelling started to increase day by day. One day, a small missile hit our roof... The next day, a big shell hit our neighbor's house. The woman was killed and her children lost their legs. It was then that my parents decided that we needed to leave."
Even before the shelling began, Raed said, "The Syrian army would also come into our house every now and then looking for weapons. Thank God they never arrested my father. He is not with the opposition, but that in itself does not mean much, as they are also taking away people that are not with the opposition.
"When we left our house, we moved to my grandmother's house on the opposite street. We stayed there for a month in better and calmer conditions, but then that area also started to become restless. So we knew we had to leave.
"We decided to … come to Jordan… because the security situation in Lebanon is not very good. Also if you are a Sunni in Hezbollah-controlled territories you are in trouble. I do not think we can return any time soon to Syria. My grandmother [who stayed behind in Syria] says there are a lot of curfews and arrests and a lot of killing. The other day we heard of two cars that picked up a 17-year-old girl from the street and she disappeared."
Other refugee children told similar stories to the UNHCR. Most, Absalem said, leave Syria with their savings: "If they had a house, a car or a business, they try to sell those things before leaving the country, and they live on those savings for the first few months or weeks, depending upon how much they had." Others don't get the chance to sell what's left of their house.
Aya, a young refugee in Lebanon told the UNHCR, "We were in the house when they bombed our house, and we cried so many times. Then we came here to Lebanon."
Ahmed, a 14-year-old refugee who has spent a year at the Za'atari camp shared his story: "My brother has been killed and my sister has received a brain injury. We thought we could not bring her here at first, but in the end we brought her and my brother here in an ambulance. We ended up burying him here."
Iman, an 11-year-old who is already a 10-month veteran of the Za'atari refugee camp, recalled: "The principal told us the army was planning on occupying our school… During those days we would see rockets flying directly over us, and we were trying to hide from them. That's when my uncle suggested that we leave for Za'atari… Here we can go to sleep in peace and never worry about the shelling, but sometimes we hear fireworks and we think we are being attacked again, but we're just imagining it because of everything we've been through."
Now Za'atari holds an estimated 120,000 refugees and is the fifth largest city in Jordan. To keep the refugees alive and healthy, Alsalem said, 3.5 million liters of water are trucked to the camp every day. The Jordanian military, along with relief agencies, provide at least three field hospitals, at least seven health facilities, schools, and even soccer fields so that Za'atari has many of the facilities of a real city. But still, to the refugee children and their families, it isn't home.
After two years, the Syrian refugees keep arriving. In the last 10 days, according to the UN refugee agency, another 30,000 Syrians fled northern Syria into Iraq. UNHCR spokesman Dan McNorton said that many refugees in this latest surge reported that they were fleeing aerial bombardments, ground fighting and rising tensions among factions across northern Syria. As with other waves of Syrian refugees, about half are children.
"What is at stake," UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres said, "is nothing less than the survival and well-being of a generation of innocents… Even after they have crossed a border to safety, they are traumatized, depressed and in need of a reason for hope."
Raed, the 17-year-old refugee from a solid, entrepreneurial family in Syria, is a prime example. "When I think of the future," he said, "I see it all black. I have lost several friends back in Syria who were killed in the conflict. I do not know what will become of me or my life. Living here is not easy, but going back seems to be impossible."
The refugee children, in their interviews with UNHCR, did not express a desire for one side or the other to win the conflict. It seemed irrelevant. Their wishes centered on a desire for normalcy.
Jana, a 9-year-old in Za'atari, said, "All I wish is that Syria could become peaceful again. That's all I want, for the trouble to stop… I hope everything goes back to normal."
"I want to return to Syria to live in peace and go back to school. I want to play with my old friends again, just like before," Ibrahim, 9, said. "I want our country to be safe, safe enough to live in, and for it to be prosperous again."
More information is at supportunicef.org or the UNHCR's Syrian refugee crisis page.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
