Syria’s children in torment as the world looks away

Syria’s children in torment as the world looks away
Last year while in Syria I made some photographs in the backstreets of Raqqa city. The images showed some volunteer emergency workers retrieving the body parts of people who had been killed and dumped in mass graves or discovered in bombed-out buildings.

In one picture a row of young boys looks on as body bags are loaded into an ambulance. Some cover their faces with the neck of their T-shirts, trying to ward off the terrible cloying stench from the corpses, while others stare impassively or seem fixated.

Children especially so often bear the brunt of war. There was another powerful photographic reminder of that last week in the heart-breaking image of a five-year-old Syrian girl’s desperate attempt to save her seven-month-old sister in the rubble of a building hit by an airstrike.

Syrian photographer Bashar al-Sheik, captured the scene last Wednesday in the town of Ariha in the country’s northwest Idlib province.

The girl, whose name was Riham al-Abdullah, is seen buried up to the neck in slabs of concrete but still trying to reach out to her baby sister Touka, who dangles precariously by her shirt caught on rubble in an effort to stop the toddler falling to the ground several storeys below.

Above them their father cries in anguish unable to reach both of them. Syrian media later reported that Riham and her mother died in hospital from their injuries while Touka remains in intensive care. Their other sister Dalia, barely visible in the photo, is also recovering after a chest surgery. 

Why are Syrian children like these continuing to suffer and die in this most grotesque way while the world looks on seemingly unable or unwilling to prevent it?

That was the question posed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Friday, describing the intensifying campaign of airstrikes killing civilians in Syria as having been meet with a “collective shrug” internationally.

“Several hundreds of thousands of children, women and men have been killed in Syria since 2011,” the High Commissioner said.

In the midst of this relentless bloodletting, children are the most vulnerable and among many of the victims. In the area of Idlib alone, where tiny Riham al-Abdullah struggled to save her sister Touka, the number of children killed in the past four weeks has exceeded the total for 2018, according to humanitarian agency Save the Children and its partner organisation Hurras Network.

That the area is technically one of four so called “de-escalation zones”, truce areas brokered by Turkey, Russia and Iran in May 2017, only adds to the accusations of international indifference. The escalation in violence, which started at the end of April, has now resulted in the deaths of at least 1000 people, including 90 children, and displaced 440,000 people.

Save the Children confirmed that at least 33 children have been killed since June 24, compared to 31 children killed during all of 2018.

“The current situation in Idlib is a nightmare. The injuries we are seeing are horrific.

It’s clear that once again children have been killed and injured in indiscriminate attacks,” said Sonia Khush, Save the Children Syria response director. Civilians in the area also described how they felt they were being deliberately targeted.

“The bombardment is relentless. It seems as though the different sides have stopped fighting each other and are fighting us, civilians, now. It’s just senseless brutality. I saw dozens of people killed in the marketplace, torn to pieces, including many young children who were playing on the street. They should have been safe,” Ahmad, an eyewitness, told Save the Children using a pseudonym. 

If 2018 was the deadliest year for children since the start of the war in Syria then this year is shaping up no better. After eight years of war 13.1 million people require humanitarian assistance, including 5.6 million children. A staggering 2.5 million Syrian children are now living as refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. During visits to these countries I’ve seen for myself the often-terrible conditions in which many of them live and the war’s impact on their physical and mental well being.

In countries neighbouring Syria where many refugees with children now find themselves, psychosocial support and psychiatric care are predominantly privatised. The situation is also compounded by a severe shortage of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

Inside Syria itself, of course, there is little in the way of clinical help. Those doctors who are treating child survivors of the violence say the devastation and lasting mental health implications far exceed any symptoms they have seen before, eclipsing all existing notions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. Dr Mohammed K Hamza, a neuro-psychologist with the Syrian-American Medical Society (SAMS), created the term “human devastation syndrome” because he thought anything else was simply not adequate to accurately describe the levels of horror experienced by the child survivors.

Hamza chairs the mental health committee of SAMS, whose 1000 or so Syrian-American members have volunteered to provide medical aid wherever survivors of the war can be found.

“We have talked to so many children, and their devastation is above and beyond what even soldiers are able to see in the war,” Hamza said in an interview with online US media company ATTN.

“They have seen dismantled human beings that used to be their parents, or their siblings. You get out of a family of five or six or 10 or whatever, you get one survivor, two survivors sometimes. A lot of them have physical impairments. Amputations. Severe injuries. And they’ve made it to the refugee camp somehow.’’ For many youngsters trapped in Syria’s war zones, the trauma often proves too much. According to Ana Moughrabieh, another Syrian-American critical care specialist who continues to help fellow colleagues in Syria’s Idlib province via telemedicine, last year medical workers witnessed a troubling pattern emerging among some women and teenagers.

For brief periods women and teenagers were admitted to local hospitals after suicide attempts by ingesting insecticides. The insecticide is known locally as “gas pill” and leads to multiple organ failures, causing a painful and slow death.

A few days ago in the rubble of her home, five-year-old Riham al-Abdullah died while reaching out a helping hand to her little sister. The time is now long overdue for the world to do the same for the sake of all Syria’s children.

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