One million children have officially been forced to leave Syria due to hostilities within their home country, Hit the jump for details!
Reports issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNICEF have stated that the number for refugee children leaving their home country of Syria has officially reached One million. The number makes a statement of awareness for all but mostly those within UNICEF.
“This 1 millionth child refugee is not just another number,” UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a statement. “This is a real child ripped from home, maybe even from a family, facing horrors we can only begin to comprehend.”
The civil war in Syria is the cause of the millions searching for refugee within Syria. The civil war is in its third year and has resulted in two million and still counting, fleeing their home country.
“The U.N. has called the worst humanitarian crisis the world has seen in almost 20 years”
Half of those fleeing the country have been thought to be children, 75 % of them are under the age of 11. It is presumed that 3,500 have crossed the Syrian border alone, or unaccompanied by a family member.
‘”This is largely a children’s refugee crisis,” Jana Mason, a UNHCR senior advisor for government relations and external affairs, told The Huffington Post on Thursday. “[You’d be amazed] by just how many young children there are — we’re talking really little children. It’s just heartbreaking.”‘
Reasons for the mass amount of fleeing is accredited to the overcrowding of refugee camps in which residents must stay as well as the lack of resources provided, clean water, food, medical help, poor sanitation, and violence.
“Child refugees have had it the worst of all, says Mason. Among the major concerns are child labor, forced conscription, early marriage, gender-based violence and potential sexual exploitation and trafficking”.
Those within Unicef including Mason have been working on trying to get the children birth certificates for those born as “refugees”, as well as fighting for their education. Yet Mason stated that it is very hard for this t take place when one can not even figure out where the children were born in order to gather documents.
Mason further stated that even when Syria is in a better place, its children may still not be:
“So many children are suffering from psycho-social trauma,” she said. “They’ve witnessed horrific, horrific things. I met a boy with burns on his face after a house he was in exploded. Another boy I met was so traumatized by his experiences that he could barely move. These kids need a lot of social and psychological support.”
“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that … when Syria is peaceful enough in the future and people start returning home, we’ll have a generation [of people] who are undereducated and traumatized. The future for Syria is very distressing”.
** Check out the gallery above for a pic of the Syria Refugee Camp**
Via HuffPost
