By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Managing Editor, Impunity Watch

DAMASCUS, Syria – The future remains bleak for the millions of Syrians displaced by Syria’s prolonged civil war as the conflict enters its fifth year. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conditions for internationally displaced persons and refugees and the political situation in the country continues to deteriorate as the war rages and the conflicts victims fail to receive international support. “With no political solution to the conflict in sight, most of the 3.9 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt see no prospect of returning home in the near future, and have scant opportunity to restart their lives in exile,” a UNHCR statement released in Geneva said.

“More and more Syrians are losing hope. Thousands have tried to reach Europe by taking often deadly land or sea routes after paying their life savings to smugglers. Many have not made it. Those who do, face rising hostility as refugees are conflated with security concerns in a climate of rising panic,” the UNHCR statement said.

A recent survey of 40,000 Syrian families living as refugees in urban areas of Jordan determined that two-thirds were living below the absolute poverty line. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres said much more must be done to address the plight of Syrian refugees. “After years in exile, refugees’ savings are long depleted and growing numbers are resorting to begging, survival sex and child labor. Middle-class families with children are barely surviving on the streets: one father said life as a refugee was like being stuck in quicksand – every time you move, you sink down further,” he said. “This worst humanitarian crisis of our era should be galvanizing a global outcry of support, but instead help is dwindling. With humanitarian appeals systematically underfunded, there just isn’t enough aid to meet the colossal needs – nor enough development support to the hosting countries creaking under the strain of so many refugees,” Guterres added.

In December, the United Nations began the largest aid appeal ever for $8.4 billion that if fully funded, would provide for the basic needs of refugees. The program would offer support to host communities to bolster their infrastructure and services utilized by refugees escaping a conflict whose end is not in site. “Further abandoning host countries to manage the situation on their own could result in serious regional destabilization, increasing the likelihood of more security concerns elsewhere in the world,” Guterres stressed.

Five years of war have taken a particularly devastating toll on the conflict’s smallest victims, many of whom are too young to remember a time of peace. Approximately 14 million children in Syria and Iraq now live every day in the shadows of war facing extreme violence, the hardships of displacement United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations agency charged with promoting the welfare of the children worldwide. “As the crisis enters its fifth year, this generation of young people is still in danger of being lost to a cycle of violence – replicating in the next generation what they suffered in their own,” said UNICEF director Anthony Lake. More than 2.6 million Syrian children are out of school and many more are now receiving education from extremist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) which has begun teaching its extremist ideology in local schools and has forced young boys to become child soldiers.

For more information please see:

Al Arabiya – 14 million children suffering from Syria and Iraq wars: UNICEF – 13 March 2015

The Christian Science Monitor – As Syrian civil war enters fifth year, especially hard challenges for children – 13 March 2015

National Public Radio – Drawn-Out Syrian Civil War Spawns A Literal Dark Age – 12 March 2015

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – UNHCR warns of bleaker future for refugees as Syrian conflict enters 5th year – 12 March 2015

By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Managing Editor

DAMASCUS, Syria –Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the militant Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) which now controls large tracks of Iraq and Syria has reportedly accepted the pledgee of allegiance from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, his spokesperson said in a statement, also calling on African supporters to take up arms. “Our caliph, God save him, has accepted the pledge of loyalty of our brothers of Boko Haram so we congratulate Muslims and our jihadi brothers in West Africa,” Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani said in recorded message.

 

The audio recording was posted online by ISIS supporters in a 28-minute message. The message says that the caliphate, or Islamic State ISIS purports to have founded has now expanded to western Africa. The spokesman congratulated the group’s “jihadi brothers” there. Al Adnani also encourages people to take up arms in Africa if they cannot make the trip to Iraq or Syria. While the authenticity of the message has not ben confirmed, it is feared the message marks the beginning of relations between these separate extremist movements which have together committed untold atrocities in Africa and the Middle East.

Boko Haram has killed thousands of civilians and kidnapped hundreds of people, including hundreds of young girls who were kidnaped from a Nigerian school, during a six-year campaign against the Nigerian government in an attempt to establish an Islamist state in northern Nigeria, the group pledged its allegiance to ISIS last week, highlighting increased coordination between Islamic extremist movements across north Africa and the Middle East.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has declared a caliphate in the territories it has captured in Iraq and Syria. The militants have targeted religious minorities and dissidents, kidnaping and murdering hundreds and forcing women into sex slavery. The group has also posted horrific videos of child soldiers, destruction of cultural antiques as well as videos showing the brutal murder of both Arab and Western hostages. ISIS militants, who have taken up arms against all but their own narrow and skewed interpretation of early Sunni Islamic theology issued a threat to religious minorities  “If you want to save your blood and money and live in safety from our swords … you have two choices: Either convert or pay jezyah.”

Officials in the United States have said they were skeptical of whether Boko Haram’s allegiance ISIS would translate into attempts by ISIS militants to provide the Nigerian movement with financial support or even weapons. “We do not currently see any reflections that ISIL would seek to subsume Boko Haram into its own caliphate or even priorities a terrorist partnership with the group,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “Both groups, however, benefit from making the world think that the two deadliest terrorist organizations in history are working together more closely than they actually are,” the official said.

Even if the purported allegiances between these two extremist organizations does not translate into financial or logistical support from either side the allegiance may serve to increase the perceived legitimacy of ISIS and Boko Haram. According to Jacob Zenn, a terror expert who lives in Nigeria

“Boko Haram will get legitimacy, which will help its recruiting, funding and logistics as it expands.” He argued the allegiance “will also get guidance from ISIS in media warfare and propaganda. Previously Boko Haram was a sort of outcast in the global Jihadi community. Now it is perhaps ISIS’s biggest affiliate. ISIS gets more international legitimacy as a global caliphate.” For both Boko Haram and the ISIS movement, propaganda like the latest pledge of allegiance has become a weapon of extremism and an attempt to expand the reach of extremist ideology and power.

For more information please see:

Reuters – Islamic State leader accepts allegiance of Nigeria’s Boko Haram  — 13 March 2015

CNN International – ISIS leader purportedly accepts Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance – 12 March 2015

Time Magazine – ISIS Welcomes Boko Haram Pledge – 12 March 2015

CNN International – Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS: What it means – 10 March 2015

By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Managing Editor

DAMASCUS, Syria – A new propaganda video released by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) appears to show a young children shooting a detainee the group has claimed was an Israeli spy, a chilling representation of the organizations complete disregard for international law and basic human decency. The victim was identified in the video as 19-year-old Mohamed Said Ismail Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent. The video shows Musallam’s Israeli passport claiming that this document is somehow proof that he was an agent sent to infiltrate the group. The young man’s family says he had no ties with the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, and had, in fact, been recruited by ISIS as a potential member of the militant group. “Mohamed told me and his brother that ISIS took him,” according to Said Musallam, his father. “They sent him money through the Western Union. They said you will have girls, money, cars, villas, paradise, but afterwards he discovered that there is nothing.”

While propaganda videos depicting the brutal murder of detainees have become relatively common propaganda tools for the ISIS movement this video was particularly disturbing because of the young face behind the trigger. Unlike past videos the executioner was not a masked man but was instead a young child.

Another video released in January apparently shows a young boy with a pistol apparently shooting two men in the back of the head. The boy then stands over one of the bodies, fires two more times. Last August, a photo posted to Twitter from an ISIS stronghold showed a 7-year-old boy holding a man’s severed head and his father’s words, “That’s my boy.”

ISIS has taken over schools to indoctrinate children. Human Rights Watch reports ISIS and other extremist groups “have specifically recruited children through free schooling campaigns that include weapons training and have given those dangerous tasks, including suicide bombing missions.” ISIS makes no attempt to hide its use of child soldiers, proudly calling the young fighters “cubs of the caliphate. The group has even called on foreign fighters who come to Iraq and Syria to going the fight to bring their own children and families to the war zone.

The use of child soldiers, which includes any child under the age of 18, is a war crime. Child soldiers, far too young to understand the war around them, often experience psychological trauma from their experiences. According to The Guardian, a study of 300 former Ugandan child soldiers found that approximately one third of the young fighters were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two-thirds were suffering behavioral and other emotional problems, mostly anxiety and depression.

For more information please see:

CNN International – New ISIS Video Claims To Show Child Killing Palestinian Captive – 11 March 2015

National Post – ISIS Releases Video of Extremists Killing Man They Said Was an Israeli Spy: They Made A Boy Do the Dirty Work – 11 March 2015

The Guardian – ‘Raising tomorrow’s Mujahedeen’: The Horrific World of Isis’s Child Soldiers – 10 March 2015

Haaretz – ISIS Releases Video Purporting To Show Child Soldier Killing ‘Israeli Spy’ – 10 March 2015