A report by a local human rights monitoring group has shown “vast difference between the information provided by the United Nations on Syria” and what is really happening on the ground, criticizing the performance of UN staff covering the conflict in Syria.
In a report issued on Thursday under the title ‘Syria is the World’s Worst Country in Terms of Child Mortality,’ the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that “the UN Secretary General report does not accurately reflect the gravity of the atrocities of the Syrian crisis.”
“The figures which was recently published by the UN do not reflect the reality on the ground in Syria which is the worst country around the world in terms of casualties among children.”
The SNHR report stresses that “there is a vast difference between what the UN Secretary-General report said and what SNHR had been able to document.”
The Network added: “While the UN recorded the death of only 652 children, SNHR has documented, by names and details, 3,923 children victims in 2016 alone – six times more than what the UN recorded in Syria.”
The rights group said that these figures “reflect a blatant carelessness in documenting children victims, and the violations in Syria in general. This is can be owed to the shortage of manpower in the team working on Syria at the UN.”
“The OHCHR website has completely stopped counting the victims of the armed conflict in Syria in 2014, without establishing any alternative option to separately document the death toll for each new year.”
The SNHR report indicated “that no less than 251 cases of arrest made against children by Syrian regime forces have been documented in 2016 compared to only 12 cases documented in the UN Secretary-General report.”
SNHR said it had recorded “no less than 1,926 cases of children being conscripted by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, trumping all other parties in that respect.”
The Network went on to say that “the UN Secretary General report has failed to address the toll of children victims who were killed in chemical attacks carried out by Syrian regime forces that resulted in the killing of 21 children and injured 35 others in 25 different chemical attacks in 2016 alone.”
Moreover, SNHR said that “the UN Secretary General report did not address the children victims who were killed in attacks by government forces and their Russian allies in which cluster munitions and landmines were used. There has been no less than 171 attacks using cluster munitions by Syrian-Russian alliance forces that resulted in the killing of 113 children.”
The SNHR report called on the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict to “coordinate and work with Syrian human rights groups who are active in the field of documenting and archiving violations in Syria in order to contribute to and assist the UN’s efforts for the sake of obtaining more comprehensive and accurate information and data on Syria. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
