Syria: EU Official Killed, Generation of Children Suffering

Local Editor

A policy officer at the European Union's delegation in Syria was killed in a rocket attack on a Damascus suburb on Tuesday, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Wednesday.

Ahmad Shihadeh was killed while giving humanitarian help to people in the suburb of Deraya, where he lived, Ashton said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the international Non-Governmental Organization, Save the Children, issued a report whereby it cited new research carried out among refugee children by Bahcesehir University in Turkey which found that one in three reported having been punched, kicked or shot at.

It said two thirds of children surveyed said that they had been separated from members of their families due to the conflict and a third said they had experienced the death of a close friend or family member.
The aid group further warned that some two million children in Syria are facing, among other things, malnutrition, disease, early marriage and severe trauma as a result of the civil war.

The report entitled "Childhood Under Fire" clarified that the conflict has left many children traumatized, unable to go to schools and struggling to find enough to eat.
"I have to say I have been shocked and horrified by the stories that I've heard from the children here in Lebanon who fled from Syria," Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, stated.

"You never want to hear a child talk about watching their friend killed or their father tortured in front of them or their brother shot through the leg," added Forsyth, and warned that "Syria's children will need decades to heal from the trauma,"
Similarly, a report issued by UNICEF Tuesday said unrelenting violence, massive population displacement, and damage to infrastructure and essential services caused by the Syrian conflict risk leaving an entire generation of children scarred for life.
"As millions of children inside Syria and across the region witness their past and their futures disappear amidst the rubble and destruction of this prolonged conflict, the risk of them becoming a lost generation grows every day," said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.
The report said that in areas where the fighting is most intense, few people have access to fresh water. Also, one in five schools have been destroyed, damaged, or is being used to shelter displaced families.
In Aleppo, the center of months of fighting, only 6 per cent of children are attending school, the report said.

At the same time, children are suffering the trauma of seeing family members and friends killed, while being terrified by the sounds and scenes of conflict.
While the reports did not give a number of children killed or wounded in the civil war, the Violations Documentation center in Syria, a key activist group that keeps tracks of Syria's dead, wounded and missing persons, says that some 5,500 children, including 3,800 boys and nearly 1,700 girls, have been killed in the past two years.
Save the Children, which provides humanitarian relief in Syria and neighboring countries, called on all groups taking part in the conflict to allow unfettered, safe access to populations in need and to "ensure that everything is done to bring the fighting to an end."

In the report, it said that young boys are being used by armed groups as porters and human shields at the front lines. It added that some girls are being married off early to protect them from a widely-perceived threat of violence.
The report says that combined with the breakdown of society in parts of the country, and more than 3 million people internally displaced, the conflict has led to "the collapse of childhood for millions of youngsters."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org