BEIRUT — Mohammed works at a Beirut supermarket where he waits on clients and carries their groceries home for a small tip that the 14-year-old saves to send later to his family in a village in northeastern Syria. He is among thousands of Syrian children who have dropped out of school and fled two years of conflict that have claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people, including thousands of children. He is also one of countless young Syrians now frequently seen wandering the streets of Beirut, pumping gas at stations and sometimes begging for money. Aid groups warn that some two million children in Syria are facing, among other things, malnutrition, disease, early marriage and severe trauma as a result of the civil war. To mark the second anniversary of the uprising against President Bashar Al-Assad, the Britain-based charity Save the Children released a report Wednesday entitled “Childhood Under Fire.” It says the conflict has left many children traumatized, unable to go to schools and struggling to find enough to eat. “I have to say I have been shocked and horrified by the stories that I've heard from the children here in Lebanon who fled from Syria,” Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, told The Associated Press at the group's offices in Beirut. “You never want to hear a child talk about watching their friend killed or their father tortured in front of them or their brother shot through the leg,” added Forsyth, who spent several days in Lebanon last week meeting children among the estimated 320,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to the neighboring country. Syria's children will need decades to heal from the trauma, he warned. Similarly, a report issued by UNICEF Tuesday said unrelenting violence, massive population displacement, and damage to infrastructure and essential services caused by the Syrian conflict risk leaving an entire generation of children scarred for life. “As millions of children inside Syria and across the region witness their past and their futures disappear amidst the rubble and destruction of this prolonged conflict, the risk of them becoming a lost generation grows every day,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. The report, marking the 2-year anniversary of the crisis, said that in areas where the fighting is most intense, few people have access to fresh water. Also, one in five schools have been destroyed, damaged, or is being used to shelter displaced families. In Aleppo, the center of months of fighting, only 6 percent of children are attending school, the report said. At the same time, children are suffering the trauma of seeing family members and friends killed, while being terrified by the sounds and scenes of conflict. While the reports did not give a number of children killed or wounded in the civil war, the Violations Documentation center in Syria, a key activist group that keeps tracks of Syria's dead, wounded and missing persons, says that some 5,500 children, including 3,800 boys and nearly 1,700 girls, have been killed in the past two years. VDC also says 901 boys and 28 girls are in detention while about 100 children are missing. Forsyth said the 5,500 figure “is very conservative. A lot of children have been killed and injured.” Children in Syria were targeted early on in the uprising, and right groups routinely report on teenagers imprisoned and sometimes beaten and tortured. — AP
