What drives children in Syria to leave their schools and engage in early labor, even in hazardous and physically demanding work that puts their lives at risk? And who is responsible for this situation?
Child labor is a harsh reality in many countries in the Arab region, including Syria, which has been enduring a war for over 11 years. Thousands of children are forced to leave their schools and enter the labor market, engaging in strenuous work that poses dangers to their lives, especially in sectors like oil refining and other similarly challenging and hazardous jobs in northwestern Syria.
Several makeshift petroleum refineries are scattered across various regions in northern Syria. They operate in a primitive manner, refining imported oil from areas controlled by the United States. Locally, these refineries are known as “oil burners.” They provide fuel for the local market, used for cars, heating, and cooking. However, these refineries pose significant health hazards, and hundreds of children work in collecting waste resulting from burning or refining processes, as well as in cleaning the tanks from the inside and removing contaminants that are toxic and cause various diseases such as persistent cough, allergic asthma, acute bronchitis, and lung diseases. Moreover, there are risks of explosions in these oil burners with even the slightest mistake or fuel leakage.
These dangers are not the only threat in this line of work. At any moment, these oil burners can be targeted by Russian airstrikes. These oil burners have been bombed multiple times by Russian and Syrian regime aircraft, resulting in the death of three civilians and a volunteer from the Syrian Civil Defense in March 2021.
Living hardships drive children to work Violence, economic crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic push families in Syria to the brink of despair, with approximately 90% of children needing humanitarian assistance, according to a report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The country has been plagued by successive economic crises, and the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Mark Lowcock, estimated that over 90% of Syrians live below the poverty line, with many forced to make extremely difficult choices to cover their expenses.
School dropout and entry into the labor marketو Save the Children organization states in its report that two out of every three children in northern Syria lack access to education. By analyzing publicly available data and their own programs, they found that 2.45 million children, or one in three, were already out of school by the end of 2019 across Syria. Between the first and second quarters of 2020, the number of students in education rescue programs decreased from over 11,200 to approximately 7,775. In northwest Syria, Save the Children’s partners reported losing access to nearly 50% of students in some areas after the closure of schools in March. Similar numbers were reported by teachers in the al-Hol, Roj, and al-Arishah camps in northeastern Syria, where at least 5,500 children stopped attending school.
Catherine Ahil, the advocacy director at Save the Children, states that the children involved in the research often felt they had no other choice but to leave school and work.
