Tag Archives: Children

Slow EU aid puts Syrian children’s lives on hold in Turkey

Muhammed Mazin Mekansi poses with his family at their home in Ankara

By Dasha Afanasieva

ANKARA (Reuters) – Their faces so burned by a rocket blast they cannot fully close their eyes, 13-year-old Gheis Mekansi and his sister Limar, both Syrian refugees, wait in limbo in Turkey for surgery they need to return to life and school.

A year and a half after they were caught in the attack on an opposition-controlled area of Damascus, the siblings may become victims again as 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) in aid promised by the European Union has been held up by political wrangling and red tape.

Gheis has six months to wait for facial reconstruction and needs prosthetic fingers available in Europe but not in Turkey. Until then, he and his sister stay indoors, unwilling to go outside where others laugh and stare at their disfigured faces.

“I just want to get my real face back,” Gheis said sitting next to his mother and sister in the small apartment they share in an Ankara suburb filled with Syrian refugee families.

In return for billions in cash for refugees taken in from Syria, visa liberalization and revitalized EU accession, Turkey has agreed to cooperate in stopping migrants crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece and take back those who do not qualify for asylum.

However, months after the deal was signed the EU now expects 182 million euros will have been disbursed by the end of August.

Asked why so little money had been put to use, an EU official pointed to the vast scale of the program, as well as the need to ensure that NGOs earmarked to receive the aid are up to the task.

But last month’s attempted coup in Turkey has also heightened tensions between Ankara and Brussels. Angry Turkish officials perceive a lack of sympathy from Western officials and last month President Tayyip Erdogan questioned the EU’s commitment to promises made in the migrant deal.

One Turkish NGO director who did not want to be named said disagreements between the EU and Turkey were partly to blame for delays in payments.

“The government’s perception is that the EU side is using this money as a political tool instead of wanting it to go to refugees,” he said, adding that the government does not trust the NGOs partnered with the EU.

Two government officials declined to comment, while a presidency official said only that it was important for the EU to live up to its side of the deal.

MONEY WAITING TO BE SPENT

Turkey says it is now host to 2.72 million Syrian refugees, plus tens of thousands of asylum seekers, including Iraqis and Afghans who are fleeing violence in their homelands.

It has argued it would be easier to give the money directly to the government – something the EU rejects, saying it always channels humanitarian aid through specialized agencies and non-governmental institutions so it goes directly to those in need.

However the EU official said that some NGOs in Turkey are unused to the needs and extraordinary scope of the current refugee crisis, and may lack capacity, meaning that extra checks and preparation are needed before the money is disbursed.

In the past ECHO, the European Commission’s aid arm, would typically spends around 1 billion euros backing humanitarian projects globally every year. This year it may spend that in Turkey alone.

Far from EU and Turkish bureaucracy and diplomatic tensions, Gheis and his six-year old sister Limar look at a photograph of their brother Muhammed, who died after an agonizing 10 days in hospital following the rocket attack.

Photographs showing the children building a snowman in happier times are stark contrast to their lives since the blast. In the three months Limar and Gheis were in hospital they underwent four operations each but are still unrecognizable. Gheis has no fingers and Limar can’t breathe properly.

Kerem Kinik, president of the Turkish Red Crescent, told Reuters he expected EU funds would allow children like Gheis and Limar to go to special schools and get treatment faster.

“We were expecting UN agencies and Europe to build up new capacities for at least primary health care but unfortunately we could not receive contributions.”

While Gheis’ family is getting some support from a local NGO, aid workers say there are thousands of devastated families with serious medical problems not receiving adequate help.

Muhammed Elhacmansur and his wife Meryem Elseyh hope to get their four-year-old son Ali, who was blinded by a landmine as the family fled Islamic State, to Europe for an operation to give him back his sight. Four of Ali’s siblings were killed in the explosions.

“We didn’t have any time to even bury them and gather their pieces on the field,” 42-year old Muhammed said.

While Turkey does not officially grant Syrians refugee status, a temporary protection status, in theory, allows them access to healthcare and education for children at least in Turkish. But these efforts cannot make Ali see.

“I don’t need food or clothes or any things,” Ali’s mother said. “I just want my son to recover.”

($1 = 0.8833 euros)

(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Orhan Coskun in Ankara; editing by Patrick Markey and Dominic Evans)

In Iraq, Nigeria and now Turkey, child bombers strike

Iraqi security forces remove a suicide vest from a boy in Kirkuk, Iraq,

By Patrick Markey

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The boy looked scared and younger than 16 when Iraqi police grabbed him on the street in the northern city of Kirkuk. Pulling off his shirt, they found a two-kilogram bomb strapped to his skinny frame.

That was last Sunday. Less than a day earlier, Turkey was less fortunate: a teenage bomber detonated his suicide vest among dancing guests at a Turkish wedding party, officials say, killing 51 people, nearly half of them children themselves.

Saturday’s attack at the wedding in Gaziantep marked not only Turkey’s deadliest this year, but also the first time in Turkey that militants may have deployed a child bomber in a way already used to deadly effect in wars from Africa to Syria.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has long used children. One 14-year-old bomber on a bicycle hit the Kabul NATO base in 2012 killing six people; two years later a teenager blew himself up at French cultural center in the Afghan capital.

Researchers and officials say Islamic State and other militants are now increasingly using the same tactics, perhaps to build ranks depleted by losses, preserve adult fighters or simply catch security forces off guard.

In West Africa, Boko Haram has preyed on displaced children or young girls it kidnapped to force them to become bombers. In Iraq and Syria, activists say Islamic State took in children from towns it captures or recruited families to its territory, and indoctrinated their children in its schools and camps.

Islamic State in particular, highlights its child recruits for its “Cubs of the Caliphate” brigades, publishing images and videos on social media of children receiving training and indoctrination, and carrying out bombings or executions.

“Child recruitment across the region is increasing,” said Juliette Touma, a UNICEF regional spokesperson. “Children are taking a much more active role …, receiving training on the use of heavy weapons, manning checkpoints on the front lines, being used as snipers and in extreme cases being used as suicide bombers.”

Little has been publicly released about the attacker in the Gaziantep bombing. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that the bomber was between 12 to 14 years old, and said Islamic State was probably responsible.

The blast tore into celebrations at a Kurdish wedding on the street late at night. As many as 22 of the dead were under the age of 14. No one claimed the attack, but Islamic State in the past has targeted Kurdish gatherings to stir ethnic tensions.

Turkey’s prime minister was more cautious on Monday, saying it was too early to say who carried out the attack, though security sources say witnesses reported the bomber was a child.

Turkish authorities are also investigating whether militants may have placed the explosives on the suspect, without his or her knowledge before detonating them long distance.

That tactic has been used before in Iraq, where children or even mentally disadvantaged adults have been dispatched as unwitting bomb couriers into markets and checkpoints before they are blown up from afar.

TEENAGE RECRUITS

In the failed attack in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk a day later, local television images and photographs showed the boy crying and screaming as he was grabbed by Iraqi security forces near an interior ministry building.

Security officials said the boy is 16 years old, though local media reports said he was much younger. He is an Iraqi national from Mosul, the largest urban center still under militant control, which Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces backed by U.S. air strikes are moving to liberate.

Hisham al-Hashimi, an analyst and author who advises the Iraqi government on Islamic State, says militants this year had reactivated their Heaven’s Youth Brigade, in reaction to the group’s battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria.

“Teenagers are easier to recruit for suicide missions, especially in moments of suffering or despair having lost loved ones,” he said. “They also attract less attention and less suspicion than male adults.”

Child recruits who have escaped from Islamic State ranks in its base in Syria’s Raqaa have described how they were taught to handle weapons, and also how to detonate suicide belts.

A study in February for Combating Terrorism Center at West Point military academy that examined Islamic State propaganda on child and youth ‘martyrs’ between January 2015 and 2016, found three times as many suicide operations involving children over the year.

“They represent an effective form of psychological warfare—to project strength, pierce defenses, and strike fear into enemy soldiers’ hearts,” the study said. “Islamic State is mobilizing children and youth at an alarming rate.”

Those tactics are mirrored in West Africa where U.N. officials have tracked a rise in attacks like the one carried out by a girl as young as ten who last year exploded a bomb in a busy market place in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 16 people.

Security sources at the time said the explosive device was wrapped around her body.

In an April report, UNICEF said attacks involving child suicide bombers between 2014 and this year rose four-fold in northeastern Nigeria, where militant group Boko Haram is based, and neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

A 12-year-old Nigerian girl captured with explosives in Cameroon in March told police she had been abducted by Boko Haram after the group overran her village a year earlier.

According to the UNICEF report, nearly two thirds of all the child attackers they tracked were girls. In the first six months of this year alone, UNICEF says it has also noted 38 child suicide bombers in West Africa.

“This is one of the defining features of this conflict,” said Thierry Delvigne-Jean of the agency’s west and central Africa office.

(Additional reporting by Maher Chmaytelli in Baghdad; Dasha Afanasieva and Orhan Coksun in Ankara; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Harrowing video shows dazed, bloodied boy pulled from Aleppo rubble

image of boy from Aleppo

(Reuters) – His face bloodied and completely covered in dust, the little boy sits quietly, staring ahead, dazed and shocked after an apparent air strike in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

Alone in an ambulance, the boy – identified by doctors as five-year-old Omran Daqneesh – tries to wipe the blood off his head, unaware of the injury he has sustained.

Video of children being pulled from the rubble of a building hit by air strikes in Aleppo has been widely circulated on social media, causing upset and condemnation over the harrowing reality of Syria’s five-year war.

Aleppo, split into rebel- and government-controlled areas, has become the focus of fighting in Syria’s five-year conflict.

Rebel-held areas are suffering heavy air strikes daily as pro-government forces try to retake territory lost to rebels two weeks ago in the southwest of Aleppo.

The video was shot on Wednesday in the rebel-held al-Qaterji neighborhood of the city.

It shows an aid worker carrying the little boy out of a building and placing him on a seat inside an ambulance, before rushing back out to the bombed-out scene. The boy sits alone, stunned, before two more children are brought into the vehicle. A man with blood on his face then joins them.

Last year, international sympathy for victims of Syria’s war was heightened by a photo of a drowned 3-year-old refugee from Syria, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish tourist beach. The image of Aylan, who died when a people smugglers’ boat taking his family and other refugees to a nearby Greek island capsized, swept across social media and was retweeted thousands of times.

(This version of the story has been refiled to corrects spelling of boy’s name in last paragraph)

(Reporting by Reuters Television and Beirut newsroom; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Rescuers say toxic gas dropped on Syrian town where Russian helicopter shot down

Video of people affected by chemical attack

By Lisa Barrington

BEIRUT (Reuters) – A Syrian rescue service operating in rebel-held territory said on Tuesday a helicopter dropped containers of toxic gas overnight on a town close to where a Russian military helicopter had been shot down hours earlier.

The opposition Syrian National Coalition (SNC) accused President Bashar al-Assad of being behind the attack. Assad has denied previous accusations of using chemical weapons.

A spokesman for the Syria Civil Defence said 33 people, mostly women and children, were affected by the gas, which they suspect was chlorine, in Saraqeb, in rebel-held Idlib province.

The group, which describes itself as a neutral band of search and rescue volunteers, posted a video on YouTube apparently showing a number of men struggling to breathe and being given oxygen masks by people in civil defense uniforms.

“Medium-sized barrels fell containing toxic gases. The Syrian Civil Defence was not able to determine the type of the gas,” said the spokesman.

The Syrian government and its Russian allies were not immediately available for comment.

Later, state news agency SANA said rebels had fired rockets armed with toxic gas on the government-held old quarter of Aleppo city, killing five people and causing eight breathing difficulties. It gave no further details. Rebels have denied previous accusations of using chemical weapons.

The SNC said of the reported use of poison gas in Saraqeb: “After shelling, besieging and killing civilians and perpetrating war crimes on them, the Assad regime has resorted once again, and in breach of UN resolutions 2118 and 2235, to using chemical substances and toxic gases.

“The daily reality confirms that all the international agreements and previous security council decisions, be they about chemical weapons or otherwise, are meaningless for the Assad regime.”

The Civil Defence spokesman said it was the second time Saraqeb had been hit by toxic gas. The group was aware of around nine suspected chlorine gas incidents across Idlib province since the conflict began, he said.

The U.S. State Department said it was looking into the reported use of chemical weapons in Saraqeb.

“I’m not in a position to confirm the veracity of (the reports),” said spokesman John Kirby. “Certainly, if it’s true, it would be extremely serious.”

Monitors at the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence on all sides in the civil war, said barrel bombs fell on Saraqeb late on Monday, wounding a large number of citizens.

Russia’s defense ministry said a Russian helicopter was shot down near Saraqeb during the day on Monday, killing all five people on board, in the biggest officially acknowledged loss of life for Russian forces since they started operations in Syria.

DENIALS

The helicopter came down roughly mid-way between Aleppo and Russia’s main air base at Hmeimim in the western province of Latakia, near the Mediterranean coast.

Russian air power began supporting Syrian President Bashar al Assad late last year, an intervention which tipped the balance of the war in Assad’s favor, eroding gains the rebels had made that year.

No group has claimed responsibility for downing the Mi-8 military transport helicopter.

Government and opposition forces have both denied using chemical weapons during the five-year-old civil war. Western powers say the government has been responsible for chlorine and other chemical attacks. The government and Russia have accused rebels of using poison gas.

U.N. investigators established that sarin gas was used in Eastern Ghouta in 2013. The United States accused Damascus of that attack, which it estimates killed 1,429 people, including at least 426 children. Damascus denied responsibility, and blamed rebels.

Later that year the United Nations and the Syrian government agreed to destroy the state’s declared stockpile of chemical weapons, a process completed in January 2016.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed in late 2015 that sulfur mustard, commonly known as mustard gas, had been used for the first time in the conflict, without saying which party in the many sided conflict it thought had used it.

(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Editing by Samia Nakhoul and Robin Pomeroy)

Venezuelan schoolchildren express hunger in drawings

A drawing made during a lesson at a school shows what a student ate during the course of a day in Caracas, Venezuela July 14, 2016. The student wrote, "Ate corn cake with cheese for breakfast; had spaghetti with egg for lunch and a cookie for dinner." The student said that pizza was their favourite dish.

By Daniel Kai

CARACAS (Reuters) – When children at a Catholic-run school in a poor neighborhood of Venezuela’s Caracas capital began fainting from hunger, teachers asked them to draw or describe their most recent meals and what they expected to eat next.

The responses were shocking.

Some of the 478 kindergarten and primary students had gone without breakfast and were skipping other meals. Others expected to eat only bread, yucca or “arepa,” a form of cornmeal flatbread that is a local staple.

The drawings and texts at the Padre Jose Maria Velaz school in western Caracas are another symptom of the oil-rich South American nation’s deep economic crisis and its effects on nutrition and eating habits.

Due to the faltering socialist economy and the plunge in global oil prices, Venezuela has been in recession since early 2014. It suffers from the world’s highest inflation and is experiencing shortages of basic goods, from milk to medicines.

Huge lines at shops and pharmacies are now the norm, and hungry residents are quickly stripping the nation’s lush mango, coconut and papaya trees.

Depicting their latest meals, some students at Padre Jose Maria Velaz drew just mangoes and plantains. One said he had eaten rice and beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Another said he had no breakfast. “We are waiting for food.

“I have pasta and ham for lunch,” he added. “I’m hungry.”

School director Maria Hidalgo said one in four children there were eating inadequately, and some teachers had also fainted from hunger.

“It’s dramatic, what we are going through,” Hidalgo said. “What kind of Venezuela are we going to have in 10 years?”

Critics say Venezuela’s crisis is the fault of economic policies under President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. But the government says it is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition politicians, businessmen and the United States.

Alexis Marin, who runs the food program for state schools, said children were receiving proper supplies.

“With all the economic war, they couldn’t destroy the school food program,” he told state TV.

The children at Padre Jose Maria Velaz at least had a happy reprieve: Nearby private textile company Telares de Palo Grande and local charity Mi Convive recently organized a party around a healthy meat soup for all to mark the end of the school year.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Child hunger and death rising in Zimbabwe due to drought, charity says

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Child hunger and deaths are rising in Zimbabwe due to the worst drought in two decades, with thousands facing starvation by the end of the year without additional aid, an international charity said on Thursday.

Southern Africa has been hard hit over the past year by drought exacerbated by El Niño, a warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which has wilted crops, slowed economic growth and driven food prices higher.

“This is an emergency,” Save the Children UK’s interim chief executive Tanya Steele said in a statement, after visiting Binga, on Zimbabwe’s western border with Zambia.

“Some children are already dying of complications from malnutrition.”

Mothers are foraging for wild berries and roots to feed their children, while going without food themselves for up to five days, the charity said.

The number of under-fives who have died of hunger-related causes in Binga town has reached 200 over the last 18 months — triple the usual rate, it said.

More than 60 million people, two thirds of them in east and southern Africa, are facing food shortages because of droughts linked to El Nino, according to the United Nations.

The U.N. World Food Programme estimates around 4 million people — one in three Zimbabweans — are struggling to meet their basic food needs.

The peak of the emergency is likely to be between October and March, the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF) said.

Hundreds of young children across the country are being admitted to hospital for malnutrition each month, it said, while child neglect, abuse and child labor are on the rise.

HIV/AIDS is often one of the underlying causes of malnutrition in Zimbabwe, where 15 percent of adults are living with the disease, U.N. figures show.

The number of children suffering malnutrition is expected to rise sharply in the coming months, Save the Children said.

“Most of the severely malnourished children who receive no help are likely to die,” it said.

“Around half of these with moderate acute malnutrition could also perish without some form of intervention.”

El Nino ended in May but meteorologists predict a La Nina event, which usually brings floods to southern Africa, is likely to develop in the second half of this year,

Erratic, late rains in Zimbabwe led to a poor harvest in April, with some families suffering their second or third consecutive year of poor production, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Iraq’s war children face void without world’s help: UNICEF country chief

UNICEF Iraq Representative Peter Hawkins speaks with media at a school for displaced people who fled from Mosul, in Nahrawan district, southeast of Baghdad, Iraq December 16, 2015. Picture taken December 16, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad

By Tom Esslemont

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A generation of children face the bleak prospect of going without an education unless the Iraqi government, its allies and aid agencies rebuild communities torn apart by years of war, a senior U.N. children’s agency official said on Friday.

Peter Hawkins, UNICEF representative in Iraq, said recent fighting between government forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, and Islamic State fighters, had cut off thousands of children from school and healthcare.

“We are faced with a whole generation losing its way and losing prospects for a healthy future,” said Hawkins in an interview.

Government institutions, faced with financial deficit, are collapsing leaving them dependent on U.N. agencies to provide schools and teacher training, following more than a decade of sectarian violence, Hawkins said during a visit to London.

“What is needed is a cash injection through central government so that we can see it building the systems required for an economic turnover,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Conflict has worsened the situation across Iraq, with an estimated 4.7 million children – about a third of all children in the country – in need of assistance, the U.N. agency said in a report last month.

Mass movements of people forced from their homes by fighting in areas like Ramadi and Falluja, west of the capital, Baghdad, put one in five Iraqi children at risk of death, injury, sexual violence, abduction and recruitment into fighting, the report said.

UNICEF said earlier this year that at least 20,000 children in Falluja faced the risk of forced recruitment into fighting and separation from their families.

“A big problem is the lack of schools, with a lack of investment in recent years meaning the systems have all but collapsed,” Hawkins said.

CHILD RECRUITMENT

Thousands of civilians across much of western Iraq’s rugged Anbar province have been driven from their homes into the searing desert heat in the last two years, as a tide of Islamic State fighters took control of key towns and cities.

Despite losing considerable ground on the battlefield, a massive suicide bombing in Baghdad’s central shopping district of Karrada last weekend showed Islamic State remains capable of causing major loss of life.

In Anbar, where fighting has ruined scores of residential areas, many of the people displaced by the militants were now “in limbo”, waiting in displacement centers, Hawkins said.

Nearly one in five schools in Iraq is out of use due to conflict. Since 2014 the U.N. has verified 135 attacks on educational facilities and personnel, with nearly 800 facilities taken over as shelters for the displaced, UNICEF data shows.

But Hawkins said he expected thousands of families to soon return home and rebuild their lives.

In Ramadi, where government forces retook control last December, UNICEF will help the ministry of education reestablish schools, provide catch-up lessons and teacher training over the summer after it had been “flattened” by fighting, Hawkins said.

The veteran aid worker, who has also worked in Angola, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said his “biggest fear” was that children could get caught up in a battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s biggest northern city still held by the militants.

Protection of children must be part of a military strategy to retake Mosul, said Hawkins.

Pressures on UNICEF’s $170 million annual budget for 2016-17, which Hawkins said was short by $100 million, were hampering its ability to reach all those affected and may mean some child protection programmes are abandoned, he said.

(Reporting By Tom Esslemont, Editing by Ros; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

‘Bad Blood’ fears fuel abuse of children of Boko Haram rape

By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

ABUJA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Having been kidnapped by Boko Haram, held for almost a year, and raped by several militants, 28-year-old Aisha Umar could have been forgiven for believing her ordeal was over when she escaped and returned to her hometown in northeast Nigeria last year.

But the mother-of-four was forced to flee her home in the town of Gwoza a fortnight ago when a man threatened to murder her two-year-old boy Mohammed, the son of a Boko Haram fighter.

“He told me that if I didn’t take the child away, he would buy petrol and set the boy on fire until he burned to ashes,” Umar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Madagali, 22 km (14 miles) away, where she now lives with her brother.

The man, who saw Boko Haram kill three of his children, was one of many people in Gwoza who made it clear to Umar that her son was not welcome in the community since their return home.

“People didn’t want to play with the child … they called him Boko Haram child,” Umar said, adding that she received the most abuse from those who had lost relatives to Boko Haram.

Women who are former Boko Haram captives, and their children born out of rape, face mistrust and persecution when they return home, according to a report by peacebuilding group International Alert and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

Many people fear those held by the Islamist militant group have been radicalized and may recruit others when they return home, said the report, which was published earlier this year.

More than 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since 2012, many of whom have been raped, trained to fight, or used as suicide bombers, according to the report.

Joint operations between Nigeria and neighboring countries succeeded in driving Boko Haram from many of its strongholds last year but the Islamists have stepped up cross-border attacks and suicide bombings, many of them carried out by young girls.

“There is a belief that the blood of the father will always run in a child’s veins and therefore that these children will eventually turn on their families and communities,” said Rachel Harvey, chief of child protection for UNICEF in Nigeria.

“BOKO HARAM CHILD”

Umar was kidnapped in August 2014 by Boko Haram militants who shot her husband in the head before taking her into Sambisa Forest, a vast colonial-era game reserve where the militants hide in secluded camps to avoid the Nigerian military.

Umar believes the militant to whom she was married is the father of her two-year-old son. He was named Mohammed Yusuf after Boko Haram’s founder, who died in police custody in 2009.

When she returned home to Gwoza last year and learned that her three children from her murdered husband had been taken in by a neighbor, the family were overjoyed to be reunited.

“But people started telling them that their brother was a Boko Haram child,” she said, adding that the three children became increasingly reluctant to play with Mohammed.

“My oldest daughter told me: ‘Mummy, please, take this child to his father and come back to us’.”

Despite moving to Madagali in Adamawa state, Umar is facing fresh stigma as people become aware of her son’s heritage.

Her relatives do not want to touch Mohammed while people point at her in public and keep their distance, Umar said.

Recalling how she secretly plotted her escape from Sambisa with dozens of other women, Umar talks of how she carefully strapped her toddler to her back as she fled to keep him safe.

Yet the abuse she has suffered since escaping Boko Haram has pushed her to breaking point.

“If I had someone to take this child away from me, I would welcome the idea.”

(Reporting By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Additional Reporting and Writing by Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Japan revamps child welfare, tens of thousands still institutionalized

Children are seen through a window as they play at Futaba Baby Home in Tokyo

By Chang-Ran Kim

TOKYO (Reuters) – A baby lies in a metal-bar cot drinking from a bottle perched on his pillow in a Tokyo orphanage. There’s no one to hold and feed him or offer words of comfort.

The director of the institution, nurses scurrying busily around him, says he would like extra time and staff to pay more attention to the 70 babies and toddlers under his care, but it’s not going to happen.

“I wish we could hold them in our arms, one by one,” says Yoshio Imada. “Some people call this abuse. It’s a difficult situation.”

Japan last month passed a bill overhauling its 70-year-old Child Welfare Law, recognizing a child’s right to grow up in a family setting. It is short on specific, immediate measures, but experts say it’s a first step to making institutions a last resort, rather than the default position.

A staggering 85 percent of the 40,000 children who can’t live with their parents in Japan are institutionalized, by far the highest ratio among rich countries and prompting repeated warnings from the United Nations. Even with the revised law, Japan’s goal isn’t lofty: family-based care for a third of those children by 2029.

The statistics raise the question: where can foster parents be found for tens of thousands of children in need?

“We do the best we can but it’s obvious that a one-on-one relationship that foster parents provide is better,” says Kazumitsu Tsuru, who heads another infant institution in Tokyo.

“All children need someone who is dedicated only to them.”

A major hindrance is a lack of awareness about the fostering system – there are just 10,200 registered foster families, while adoptions are even rarer, at 544 last year. And in a society that treasures uniformity and blood ties, fostered or adopted children are often stigmatized.

A rise in reports of child abuse has also proved a stumbling block. Welfare workers are too busy taking children out of immediate harm. Placing them in institutions is faster than finding a foster family.

Too busy with the next victim, welfare workers also have little time to follow up with those children, leaving them to languish for years.

STARVED OF ATTENTION

One foster mother knows all too well how harmful institutionalization can be.

Now 16, her foster son lulls himself to sleep by pounding his head against his pillow for several minutes. It’s a habit he picked up as an attention-starved child growing up in institutions until he turned six. He is a charming boy, his foster mother says, but erratic.

“When I call him out on something he does wrong, he lashes out at me as if he can do whatever he wants,” she says.

“He’ll do hateful things and at other times he’ll say, ‘Mummy, I love you,’ in a childish voice that’s not normal for a teenage boy. The emotional ups-and-downs wear you out.”

Another mother describes a child she took in from an institution at age five, just when he was beginning to realize he had no family. He flew into fits of rage at school and was afraid to leave the house. Needing to test his new family’s affection, he would ask: “Mummy, what would you do if I died?” At other times, he would beg to be fed milk out of a bottle in his foster mother’s lap.

The warehousing of Japan’s most vulnerable highlights the paradox in a country struggling with a stalled birthrate and ballooning social welfare costs as the population ages. Experts say institutionalization costs three times as much as fostering, and that Japan’s tight job market would be better-served by shifting those caregivers to daycare services to allow more women to work.

“I think the role of infant institutions will change,” says Tsuru, adding that, as the primary caregivers, institutions like his could help find babies a match in a foster or adoptive home.

“None of us wants to see a child stay longer here than they need to be.”

(Editing by Nick Macfie)

‘I study in a cave’: Going to school in Syria

Internally displaced children attend a class inside a cave in the rebel-controlled village of Tramla, in Idlib province, Syria

By Khalil Ashawi and Bassam Khabieh

TRAMLA/DOUMA, Syria (Reuters) – Syrian student Ali Khaled Stouf has to walk down several steps into a hole in the ground to get inside his school — a cave.

There for four hours each morning, he studies subjects like Arabic, English, maths and religion, sitting on a rug with dozens of children in the underground space in Tramla, an opposition-held village in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

“I study in a cave. The conditions are not very good but the professor and his wife treat us very well,” the 14-year-old, originally from neighboring Hama province, said. “We sit on the ground and often we don’t see clearly because it is dark.”

His teacher Mohamed and his wife, also from Hama, have opened up their underground home to teach some 100 children, whose families have been displaced by the Syrian conflict.

More than five years of war, which began as a peaceful protest against President Bashar al-Assad and has since drawn in foreign military involvement and allowed for the growth of Islamic State, has displaced millions of Syrian children and limited their access to education.

With schools themselves at times attacked, teachers make do with the basics to provide education.

Mohamed said the primitive, six-month-old school floods when it rains, forcing him to teach outside or in a tent, although he prefers the security underground. “We believe the cave is the safest place from shelling and air strikes and all the students are in one place,” he said.

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Idlib province is a stronghold of insurgent groups including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and has been regularly targeted in air strikes by the Syrian government, whose war effort has been boosted by the Russian air force.

At the Souriya al-Ammal (Syria the hope) school, in the town of Maarat al-Numan, corridors and classrooms are bullet-ridden and sometimes crumbling. In one less damaged area, walls have been repainted and the school now has some 250 pupils.

“War has affected education massively; most schools, if not destroyed completely, are damaged,” school supervisor Abdullatif al-Rahoum said, adding those who missed out on education are now playing catch up with younger students.

“The biggest challenges we face are the warplanes, which never leave the skies. This always worries students.”

In the nearby town of Saraqib, a mobile caravan serves as a classroom, run by a group aiming to reach children who have no access to schooling in the area.

Lack of books is problematic. Teachers in Idlib said they relied on charities or used books printed in neighboring Turkey by the opposition run Directorate of Education.

In the rebel-held town of Douma, outside Damascus, Mounir Abdelaziz, a member of the opposition-run education body, said local schools were using old textbooks, but with changes.

“We follow the same curriculum as the education ministry but with some modifications and articles related to the (Assad) regime deleted,” he said.

(Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Dominic Evans)