GENEVA — Syria’s conflict is creating a generation of damaged children, the United Nations warned Friday in a report on the plight of more than 1 million children who are refugees in neighboring countries, many of them deprived of access to education and of any semblance of normal family life or childhood.
“The world must act to save a generation of traumatized, isolated, and suffering children from catastrophe,” the UN refugee agency warned in the report. “If we do not move quickly, this generation of innocents will become lasting casualties of war.”
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has registered more than 1.1 million children among the total of 2.2 million refugees, presenting a crisis on a scale unseen since Rwanda two decades ago, Volker Turk, the agency’s director of international protection, told reporters in Geneva. Of these refugee children, more than 385,000 were in Lebanon and 290,000 in Jordan, he said.
The conflict had caused children of all ages “to suffer immensely, both physically and psychologically,” the report said. “Children have been wounded or killed by sniper fire, rockets, missiles, and falling debris. They have experienced first-hand conflict, destruction and violence.”
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The report came less than a week after a study of Syrian casualty data released by a British think tank estimated that more than 11,470 Syrian children younger than 17 had died in the conflict.
The study by the Oxford Research Group, based on the analysis of records compiled by Syrian nongovernmental organizations, found that around 70 percent of the children were killed by “explosive weapons,” particularly aircraft bombs, rockets, and artillery shells.
It also found that 389 children were reportedly shot by snipers and that more than 700 children were summarily executed after they were captured or in “field executions,” a term encompassing massacres conducted by armed groups.
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“Whenever we interact with children, they tell us how much they miss home, how they want to go back, how horrific the situation is, and they talk mostly about death,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the UN children’s agency UNICEF.