Universal Children’s Day: over 17,000 children killed in conflict

THE LOST ONES: The Syrian Media Organization (SMO) – an Amman-based pro-opposition news agency – teamed up with activists in Syria to launch the #Children_Against_Terror campaign on Thursday to commemorate Universal Children’s Day. 

“The main goal of the campaign is to draw the world’s attention to the suffering of Syrian children and to highlight the crimes against them that occur at the hands of regime forces and Shiite militias [Hezbollah, Iraqi and Iranian forces],” Hamza Jazar, an Amman-based member of SMO, told Syria Direct Thursday.

The campaign’s Facebook page is littered with photographs of Syrian children facing dire circumstances across Syria and in its neighboring countries Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.

A report on the plight of Syrian children during the conflict also released Thursday by the pro-opposition monitoring group Syrian Network for Human Rights revealed the extent of the damage against what it calls “the lost generation.”

The group documented the deaths of 17,268 children since March 2011, including 518 who were killed by sniper fire and 95 killed under torture, according to the report.  More than 9,500 children are currently detained by the regime, while the organization added that it did not know the fate of 1,600 others.  

In addition, the report says that at least 280,000 children have been injured throughout the conflict and that an estimated 4.7 million children have been displaced across Syria – 2.9 million of them are now refugees.

-November 20, 2014

-Photo courtesy of SMO.

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