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On the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression: 30,228 Children Have Been Documented Killed in Syria Since March 2011, including 199 Who Died Due to Torture, While at least 5,263 Children are Stil Under Arrest and/or Forcibly Disappeared
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) today released a detailed annual state-ment outlining the numerous serious violations that were committed in a widespread and direct manner against children in Syria since March 2011. This statement, released to mark the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression' which is observed annually on June 4, is intended to give a sense of the magnitude of child victims in Syria, their terrible suffering amid the ongoing conflict, and the continued aggression against children's rights for over 13 years.
Children in Syria have faced repeated and wide-ranging violations, including extrajudicial killing, abduction, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance and torture, including sexu-al violence, recruitment, siege and starvation, targeting of facilities that provide basic services such as education and healthcare, denial or obstruction of the delivery of hu-manitarian assistance, and the risk of child labor in its worst forms. This interconnected, ongoing, vicious, and threatening series of violations against children has led to ramifications that will only grow more difficult to rectify as time passes for as long as the abysmal status quo in terms of the terrible crises afflicting security, human rights, the economy and society, continues.
As SNHR's database attests, the Syrian regime bears by far the greatest responsibility in terms of the number and comprehensiveness of the crimes perpetrated in a manner which exhibits a clear pattern and demonstrates the deliberate and systematic character of the regime's violations of children's rights, particularly the inherent right to life, pro-hibition of torture, and deprivation of liberty, which amount to crimes against humanity.
In fact, as SNHR has documented, children have been among those subject to almost every atrocity perpetrated against the Syrian people. Most of these violations have had a terribly destructive impact on children, depriving them of their most fundamental rights, while creating an unsuitable, life-threatening, and hostile environment in which to grow up. Needless to say, such circumstances are absolutely irreconcilable with instilling any sense of human dignity or meeting children's needs. Furthermore, those effects have been consistently compounded by the massive scale of the aggression directed against children for over 13 years. In this statement, we provide an update of the toll of most notable serious violations perpetrated against children in Syria between March 2011 and June 2024 as documented on SNHR's database (specifically crimes committed as part of the armed conflict or which constitute a violation of international human rights law).
1. Declared by the UN General Assembly in accordance with resolution ES-7/8, adopted on August 19, 1982.