Children make up disproportionate numbers in camps

KILIS, TURKEY - Fifteen-year-old Abdullah Haji Mustafa wants to fight. He’s been living in a refugee camp for a year, since his family fled Tall Rifat, an embattled town just north of Aleppo.

“Who wants not to go back?” he asks, standing between the gates of the camp and a steady stream of refugees passing through the Turkish border control. “I want to be a fighter. I will go to make freedom.”

I ask whether he thinks fighting can bring peace.

“I want peace,” he said. “A soldier is the maker of peace.”

Haji Mustafa is one of more than a million Syrian children living as refugees outside of Syria. The statistic — approximately equivalent to every single child in Toronto — is not hard to believe standing under the sign that reads “Kilis Accommodation Facilities.”

There are children everywhere. Kids offer to help refugees with their bags, wait for relatives to return from trips back into Syria or try to sell fruit to travellers passing by.

Children make up about half the refugee population. There are about 740,000 under the age of 11. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports significant numbers of unaccompanied children crossing the borders with Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. At least 7,000 Syrian children are among the 100,000 casualties of the 32-month-old civil war.

The town where Haji Mustafa comes from was under siege by Syrian security forces in 2011. In 2012 a council of Islamic scholars and former Syrian army officers took over administration of the town, ruling by sharia law. As the Syrian army has pushed to retake Aleppo, it has bombed Tall Rifat from the air, hitting civilian targets.

In the Kilis refugee camp, Haji Mustafa goes to school, studying the Syrian curriculum in Arabic with a class in Turkish language added. The Syrian teachers who run the camp school have modified the civics classes to erase the heroic portrait of the al-Assad family which was part of the curriculum inside Syria.

Haji Mustafa’s bravado isn’t shared by all Syrian children. Eleven-year-old Mohamad Zarzar is a survivor of the battle of Idlib in northern Syria.

“I don’t want to return. Not in this situation,” said the boy as he hung around a centre that offers meals, showers and counselling for Kilis’ growing refugee population.

The battle over Idlib raged for months from 2011 through 2012. At one point the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Syrian army forces were randomly shelling the city and had killed 14 civilians in the course of retaking it in April, 2012. As recently as Sept. 15 the observatory for Human Rights reported three more dead.

But kids on the Turkish side of the border are relatively lucky. They have some form of school, whether they are in the camps or in town.

“The Turkish government will not allow Syrian kids to wander around the streets, that’s for sure,” said Philippe Zarif, the Jesuit Refugee Service head of Turkish operations. “Inside the refugee camps managed by the Turkish government, schools are running.”

On the other side of the border it’s a completely different picture. Children stuck in makeshift refugee camps in Syria have no hope of school or any other program.

“Kids are not doing anything,” said Zarif. “There’s minor work done by NGOs in areas close to the border and it’s very much remote management. Other than that, you have millions of kids in Syria doing nothing.”

Zarif, a Syrian who studied and practised immigration law in Quebec before returning to Syria, praises a British program that brings Syrian teenagers to England to study. If Canada could do something similar it would be a positive contribution to a future Syria, he said.

The JRS has been working mainly inside Syria with its management based in Hatay, on the Turkish side of the border. The Jesuit NGO wants to start up psycho-social counselling in Turkey for traumatized children and eventually for teenagers and women. It’s difficult, given Turkish restrictions on foreign NGOs, but the more fundamental problem is money.

“We don’t have enough money. There’s enough to operate inside Syria. There isn’t enough money for refugee work in Turkey.”