Militant Islamist groups in Syria are recruiting children as young as 15 and sending them into battle after promising them a free education, a Human Rights Watch report said on Monday.
The report said the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which has made rapid territorial gains across the border in Iraq, had given children weapons training in Syria and told them to carry out suicide bombings.
Citing personal accounts, the rights group also found evidence of children being mobilized by the more moderate Western-backed Free Syrian Army, the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, the Islamic Front coalition and security forces in Kurdish-controlled areas.
“The horrors of Syria’s armed conflict are only made worse by throwing children into the front lines,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, the author of the report which drew on the accounts of 25 children. It said 14-year-old youths had been used in support roles for the fighting.
Reuters could not independently confirm the accounts. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad monitoring group, said on Sunday that relatives of kidnapped students in Syria fear that ISIL will use the children to carry out car bombs or suicide attacks.
Syria’s conflict started with peaceful demonstrations for political change in 2011 but has descended into a civil war, pitting forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad against a myriad of opposition groups.
Infighting among opposition combatants has complicated the conflict, which has stirred sectarian tensions across the Middle East and spilled over into neighboring countries.
HRW said the number of children fighting in Syria was not known.
The Violations Documenting Center, a Syrian monitoring group, had documented 194 deaths of “non-civilian” male children in the country since September 2011, the report said.
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