User:Darkness Shines/Child Soldiers in Syria

Civil war
During thè Syrian Civil War the use of child soldiers has been widely reported, militant groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, al-Qaeda and the anti government forces of the Free Syrian Army have recruited children for use as combatants. According to a report from UNICEF children as young as seven have been recruited. In 2016 UNICEF reported that 850 children had been recruited by all sides in the conflict that year, and that 650 children had been killed in 2016 alone. In 2014 Human Rights Watch reported that the Al-Nusra Front required their child soldiers to sign documentation in which they agreed to take part in suicide attacks.

During the battle for Mosul, over 300 child soldiers fighting for IS had been killed by October 2016.

Legal aspects
In 1989 the United Nations passed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 38 states that "state parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities." And in 2002 the optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict came into force and stipulates that state actors, "shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces". The official stance taken by UNICEF is that the use of children in armed conflicts is morally reprehensible and illegal.