human rights watch double standard children armed conflict

One father told us about the arrest of his 14-year old son: “People said they had seen him with ISIS. A child may be arrested simply because someone from their village reported them-rightly or wrongly-as connected to ISIS. The situation is particularly dire in Iraq, where the government of Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are currently detaining an estimated 1,500 children for alleged ISIS involvement. When it comes to ISIS, however, children who have been involved with the group in any capacity are increasingly being treated as criminals and charged with terrorism. These programs recognize that recruiting children for armed conflict is a violation of international law and that the primary violators of the law are the adult recruiters, not the children. In the past twenty years, tens of thousands of former child soldiers have benefited from rehabilitation programs designed to help them rejoin society. If the boy from Mosul had been part of an armed group in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or any number of other conflict countries around the world, he might be back in school or getting vocational training. But in a conflict with a so-called terrorist group, children are prosecuted as criminals and sentenced to prison as terrorists. These practices have created an unfair and dangerous double standard: in “traditional” armed conflicts, child soldiers are seen primarily as victims who need rehabilitation assistance and help reintegrating into society. The United Nations has documented a five-fold increase in the number of children detained in the context of armed conflict since 2012. With the rise of violent extremist groups like ISIS, al Qaeda, al-Shabab, and Boko Haram, many countries have adopted much more aggressive counterterrorism measures, including a marked increase in the detention and prosecution of children.

When a colleague and I met him in November in a reformatory in Erbil, he had been in prison for more than two years. Last year, a Kurdish court convicted him of terrorism. Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq captured him during a military offensive in the fall of 2016, and detained and interrogated him. He said he received twenty days of training, and then worked as a cook, making about $50 a month. With little else to do, he said, he joined ISIS to make money. He was just a 14-year-old schoolboy when the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) took over his city, Mosul, in northern Iraq.

Human rights watch double standard children armed conflict