Hogir Abdo and Abby Sewell, Associated Press
Published Wednesday, June 28, 2023 7:23 EDT
QAMISHLI, Syria (AP) – A 13-year-old Kurdish girl went missing on her way home from a school exam last month, after being approached by a man from an armed group. His parents immediately feared the worst – that he had been cajoled into joining the group and taken to one of its training camps.
The girl, Peyal Aqil, and her friends meet a man who turns out to be a recruiter for a group known as the Revolutionary Youth. He followed her to one of the group’s centers in the city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria. His friends were waiting for him outside, but he never showed up.
Peyal’s mother, Hamrin Alouji, said she and her husband complained to local authorities but to no avail.
The group later said Peyal joined voluntarily, a claim Alouji denied. “We assume that at this age, she is unable to give consent, even if she is persuaded” by the group’s program, said Alouji, sitting down for the interview in her daughter’s room, which is filled with stuffed animals and school texts.
Armed groups have recruited children during the last 12 years of conflict and civil war in Syria. A new UN report on children in armed conflict, released Tuesday, says the use of child soldiers in Syria is increasing, even as fighting in large parts of Syria is winding down.
The number of children recruited by armed groups in Syria has steadily increased over the past three years – from 813 in 2020 to 1,296 in 2021 and 1,696 in 2022, the United Nations says.
Among those suspected of recruiting children are US allies in the battle against Islamic State extremists — the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, according to the UN. By 2022, the UN linked half of cases, or 637, to the SDF and affiliated groups in northeast Syria.
The report also said the United Nations had confirmed 611 cases of recruitment by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which has clashed with the SDF in the past, and 383 by Hayat Tahrir al Sham which is linked to al-Qaida in northwestern Syria. The report cites 25 cases of recruitment of children by Syrian government forces and pro-government militias.
Children are being recruited all over Syria, said Bassam Alahmad, executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, an independent civil society organisation.
In some cases, children were forced into military service, he said. In other countries, minors register because they or their families need a salary. Some join for ideological reasons, or out of family and ethnic loyalties. In some cases, children are sent out of Syria to fight as mercenaries in other conflicts.
Efforts to end such recruitment are complicated by a patchwork of armed groups operating in every part of Syria.
In 2019, the SDF signed an agreement with the United Nations pledging to end the registration of children under the age of 18 and to set up child protection offices in its territory. The US State Department defended its ally in a statement, saying the SDF “is the only armed actor in Syria responding to UN calls to end the use of child soldiers.”
Nodem Shero, spokesperson for one of the child protection offices run by local governments affiliated with the SDF, acknowledged that children continued to be recruited in areas under SDF control.
However, the complaint mechanism is working, he said. His office received 20 complaints in the first five months of this year, he said. Four minors were found in the SDF armed forces and returned to their families. The others were not with the SDF, he said.
In some cases, he said, parents thought their children had been taken by the SDF when they were actually with other groups.
Alahmad said recruitment by the group decreased after the 2019 deal, but the SDF did not intervene because other groups in his area continued to target children.
Among them is Revolutionary Youth, a group associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement banned in Turkey. Revolutionary Youth is licensed by a local government linked to the SDF – although the two groups deny any connection beyond that.
The UN report links 10 cases to Revolutionary Youth in 2022, but others say the number is higher. In a January report, the Alahmad group said Revolutionary Youth was responsible for 45 of the 49 cases of child recruitment documented in northeastern Syria in 2022.
Alahmad said SDF-affiliated governments were looking the other way. He asked him to “shoulder his responsibility to stop this operation.”
A Revolutionary Youth official acknowledged that the group recruited underage children but denied that it forced them into military service. “We didn’t kidnap anyone, and we didn’t force anyone to join us,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with his group’s rules.
“They themselves came to us and conveyed their intention to participate in serving the nation,” he said. “We don’t take minors if they are in doubt or unsure.”
Minors were not immediately sent to the armed services, he said. Instead, they initially attend educational training courses and other activities, after which “they are sent to the mountains if they want,” he said, referring to the PKK’s headquarters in the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq.
Asked about Peyal, he said the girl complained of being unhappy at home and her parents forced her to wear the hijab.
Alouji said his daughter showed no signs of being unhappy at home, and the night before her departure had said she planned to study to become a lawyer.
A month after he disappeared on May 21, Peyal returned home. He had run away from one of the group’s training camps, his mother said.
Since her daughter’s return, “her psychological state has been difficult because she… was subjected to harsh training,” said Alouji. The family no longer felt safe, he said, and were looking for ways to get out of Syria.
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Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Omar Albam in Idlib, Syria, and Lolita Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
