Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – UNICEF reported that, the grim ten-year anniversary of the war in Syria has left 90 percent of the country’s children in need of help, as a triple crisis of violence, economic misery and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed families to the brink of despair.
“The triple crisis of 2020, and still this year, has somehow further exacerbated the situation for Syria’s children”, said UNICEF’s Representative in Syria, Bo Viktor Nylund, briefing journalists in Geneva. “So what does it mean in practical terms? It means for instance that two out of three families report that they cannot meet their basic needs.
More than half a million children under five in Syria suffer from stunting as a result of chronic malnutrition, according to the UN agency’s statistics.
“Nearly five million children were born inside Syria over the past 10 years, with an additional one million children being born outside as refugees in Syria’s neighboring country, and these are millions of children who know nothing but death and displacement and destruction,” said the senior UNICEF official.
The number of children reported to be displaying symptoms of psycho-social distress, doubled in 2020, as they continued to be exposed to violence, shock and trauma.
“Since 2011, nearly 12,000 children were verified as killed or injured in Syria, that’s one child every eight hours over the past ten years. As we all know, these are children that the UN was able to verify as having been killed or injured, and the actual numbers are likely to be much higher”, Mr. Nylund said.
