Damascus - Geneva: Europe and the Arabs
With hopes growing that Syria's children will benefit from the fruits of peace, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) confirmed that girls and boys in Syria continue to suffer from the brutal impact of unexploded ordnance at an alarming rate, with at least 116 children killed or injured by these hidden threats in December alone.
This is what UNICEF Communications Director Ricardo Perez said from the Syrian capital Damascus, via video link during a press conference at the United Nations Office in Geneva.
Perez pointed out that at least 422,000 incidents related to unexploded ordnance have been reported over the past nine years, and it is estimated that half of them have ended in tragic injuries among children. Children across the country are facing “this latent, often invisible, and very deadly threat,” he said, stressing that renewed displacement only exacerbates the danger, with more than a quarter of a million children forced to flee their homes due to the escalation of conflict since 27 November.

“As reconstruction efforts continue to be discussed, and the international community prepares to help Syria pave a new path for children, it is imperative that immediate investment is made to ensure that the ground is safe and free of explosives,” he added. According to the UN daily news bulletin, UN official Volker Türk arrived in Damascus on Tuesday at the start of a visit to Syria and Lebanon between 14 and 16 January. During his first visit to Syria, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visited the Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of the capital, where thousands of detainees were held and subjected to torture, ill-treatment and enforced disappearance.
Among those held in Saydnaya were those considered by the regime of Bashar al-Assad – who was ousted last month – as “enemies” of the Syrian people. Hundreds of detainees have died in prison under torture and thousands remain missing, according to the UN human rights office.
Saydnaya is one of several detention facilities in Syria used by the former regime to crush dissent. The prison was built in the 1980s, following mass killings in Hama province.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, met former detainees at Saydnaya and reports received by the UN human rights office indicate that thousands of detainees at Saydnaya were summarily executed, without due process, and their deaths were not disclosed to their families. No national or international body has been allowed access to Saydnaya or other prisons run by the former regime.
Lama Al-Rifai is a Syrian lawyer who has been active in defending freedoms since the start of popular protests against the government in the southern province of Daraa in 2011. Al-Rifai and her colleagues recently visited Saydnaya prison and entered the cells to document the phrases and pictures that former detainees had carved on the walls.
Lama Al-Rifai is gathering this information for a study being conducted by a Syrian researcher at a Tunisian university. “These are isolation cells,” she said from one of the cells. “Former detainees told us that their first stage of detention was here, their first ‘welcome’ was the isolation cells. One of the notes a detainee wrote was: ‘First day, severe beating.’” Speaking from the notorious prison, Volker Turk said that Saydnaya was haunted by memories of extreme cruelty. “It is unbelievable what human beings can do to each other,” he said. “I hope from the bottom of my heart that this will be a lesson for the recovery of Syria and Syrians, and also a lesson for the world that we must never allow such cruelty to happen again.”