The terrorist group and self-proclaimed Islamic State, ISIL, also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS, has repeatedly committed fundamental violations of children’s rights in the Middle East, and more specifically in Iraq and Syria, the cluster currently controls large areas in which millions of individuals live and it has declared itself a “State” therefore it is bound under international law to respect core human rights obligations, such as the right to life, which is a fundamental inherent right of all children, the absolute prohibition of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as well as the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion but, despite committing all sorts of rights violations, both Iraq and The Syrian Arab Republic, are actually parties to major human rights treaties and various optional protocols, which evidently doesn’t prevent them from attacking and killing mercilessly hundreds of children, as a matter of fact the United Nations, even though it has limited capacity to verify information in the areas under the control of ISIL Since 2014, reported that killing and maiming continues to be the violations that most affect children and that there has been a significant increase in violence which resulted in a conservative estimation of 1,256 children killed and 1,831 children injured as a result of the conflict-related violence from 1 January 2014 to the end of April 2015.
During the past four years, boys and girls in Iraq have endured immense suffering at the hands of ISIL and have been negatively impacted by operations by the Government of Iraq and its allies, as they carried the dramatic consequences of hostilities during the period from July 2015 to July 2019, despite the end of the so-called caliphate, the security situation remains fragile and the children of Iraq continue to bear the brunt of the violence remaining detained for their actual or alleged association with ISIL, moreover, schools have been damaged and access to education in fact denied, for what concerns humanitarian access, it still remains challenging, nonetheless, important steps for the protection of boys and girls have been taken by authorities in Iraq, as the Special Representative commended the Government for finalizing its National Child Protection Policy in December 2017 and called for its complete implementation, encouraging the Government to pursue its engagement with the United Nations to develop and adopt an action plan to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children by the Popular Mobilization Forces.
“The pursuit of accountability for perpetrators, including for war crimes or crimes against humanity, will be crucial in the recovery of victims of ISIL, including children. I call on the Government of Iraq to speed up its work to prevent grave violations against children, including the criminalization of the recruitment and use of children through the adoption of a comprehensive Child Rights Law,” Special Representative Gamba added.
Furthermore, she called for the immediate repatriation of all foreign children and the development of specialized child-protection programs to ensure their full reintegration, she welcomed the Government’s special administrative process to register children born of rape and encouraged its deployment nationally, and called on the Government to issue birth certificates or identification cards to allow all children in Iraq to access public assistance and basic services, and for the Government to ensure that all children benefit from humanitarian assistance without discrimination.
The international community needs to make sure that child protection actors are provided with adequate political and financial support to enable them to fulfill their mandate and that is another reason why the Government of Iraq has been called out to strengthen mediation and to better their social efforts to protect the rights of both children and their mothers alongside working towards a durable solution to their displacement.
For what concerns protecting children’s rights, the go-to convention is the United Nations one on the Right of the Child also known as CRC, this treaty is the most ratified international human rights one in history to show how widely supported the view that children and young persons have the same basic general human rights as adults is, alongside this exchanged compact, two additional protocols were adopted by the UN General Assembly on 25 May 2000 covering the involvement of children in armed conflict and on children slavery, prostitution, and pornography.
In the aftermath of three years of armed conflict involving the Salafi jihadist militant group, thousands of Iraqi children are undocumented and at risk of statelessness, because they were born in ISIL captivity, whether or not they are the products of gender-based violence, the children born in ISIL captivity lack valid civil status registration and documentation, rendering it difficult if not impossible for them to prove their nationality and citizenship and leaving them unable to access to healthcare, housing, education, and other basic services.
On the other side of the spectrum, while the proportion of women who maintain and share the ISIS ideology remains unknown and it is not to be underestimated, women too have suffered and are still suffering a great deal of harassment coming from the terrorist group, so much so that, to avoid being raped, some of the girls killed themselves.
An actual effort to solve this problem has been made with the adoption of the Law on Yazidi Survivors which was adopted on March the 1st and recognized the violence that women and girls belonging to Yazidi, Turkman, Christian, and Shabaks minorities had to endure because of ISIL’s actions, including genocide and crimes against humanity, this law provides compensation for survivors and it includes measures to be taken for the victim’s rehabilitation and reintegration process into society as well as a commitment to prevent such crimes to happen again in the future.
References:
ISIS Forced them into sexual slavery, available at:
Iraq’s Lost generation, available at:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/featured-documentaries/2021/11/11/iraqs-lost-generation
The number of women and children who joined ISIS’ significantly underestimated, available at:
Children and Women raped by Daesh are resorting to suicide, available at:
Slaves of ISIS, available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/25/slaves-of-isis-the-long-walk-of-the-yazidi-women
The women of ISIS and the AL-hol Camp, available at:
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/women-isis-and-al-hol-camp
UN news, available at:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/04/1090322
Children born of the ISIL Conflict in Iraq, available at:
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-fsqm-r965
ISIL’ extreme violence, available at:
By Gaia Gambaro : The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
