Syria
Mourners bury the bodies of children killed on their way to school on April 4, 2022, after regime forces shelled the village of Maaret al-Naasan in Syria's rebel-held Idlib province. Photo: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Four children were killed as they made their way to school in northwest Syria’s Idlib province on Monday as regime forces shelled their town, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) conflict monitor.
The shelling targeted Maarat al-Naasan, a town in Syria's last main rebel stronghold of Idlib on the frontline between the regime and the rebels. The victims were four boys under the age of eighteen, SOHR said on Monday.
In a later update, the Principal of al-Amal school, Hajj Ahmed, confirmed that the attack happened at about 11:15 am. One of the students was in the seventh grade, two were in the eighth grade, and the other was in the ninth grade, he said, meaning they were aged somewhere between just 12 to 15 years old.
“They were on their way to start their school day and this strike by the criminal regime hit,” Ahmed said. It is believed that the boys were killed just 50 metres from the school. Their bodies were buried in the village’s cemetery later that day.
Images captured by AFP show Syrians burying the boys, wrapped in black plastic, with other children looking on and mourners praying over their bodies.
Attacks on schools in Syria have become commonplace according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who said on Monday that there have been at least 750 attacks on education facilities and personnel in Syria since 2011, with over 70% of all children killed in the country in the last year from the northwest. “Too many children [have] lost their lives on their way to and from school since the crisis began in 2011,” the UN agency commented following the attack.
On February 12, SOHR reported that regime shelling killed six people in the same town, including two women and two children.
Since early 2022, SOHR has also documented 41 murders in regime-controlled areas. In a statement on Monday, SOHR reported escalating security chaos, lack of essentials and poor surveillance across Syria, particularly in areas controlled by the Syrian regime, with the crime rate “rising on a daily basis.”
The conflict in Syria has killed at least 350,000 Syrians - with SOHR placing the figure at nearer estimating half a million - and displaced more than half of the pre-war population. According to the UNHCR, 6.6 million Syrians are refugees; mostly in neighbouring countries including the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
On the eleventh anniversary of the Syrian uprising last month, the humanitarian situation for Syrians remaining in the country could not have been starker, with a poverty rate of 90 percent, and over 14 million dependent on humanitarian aid.
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