A recent report compiled by Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) strongly implicates Turkey in the recruitment of U18s for active combat in Libya. Eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence on social media appear to verify these accusations, identifying numerous adolescent Syrians as fighters for Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA) forces since January.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the number of Syrian fighters currently in Libya is believed to be around 10,000, with a further 3,400 still undergoing training in Turkey. SOHR reports that amongst this contingent there are roughly 200 child soldiers between the ages of 16 and 18. Lured into mercenary contracts by promises of lucrative pay and the chance to escape Syria’s own hyper-violent civil confrontation, it appears that increasing numbers of Syrian minors are choosing to exchange one brutal warscape for another.
The dark truth behind this manipulation of already brutalised children is the ease with which illicit recruitment is taking place. All that is required for a Syrian child to enlist is the consent, acknowledged or fabricated, of a parent or guardian. Those families that do provide their express permission to enlist are handsomely rewarded, coerced into signing over their child by renumeration that can only be described as blood money down-payments. Once a minor has acquired parental ‘consent’ they are issued with fake identification documents, replete with new names and artificial birth certificates. According to STJ, numerous children have been registered in the name of their older brothers, enabling them to fight in flagrant contravention of international law.
Following receipt of this new identity, boys* become eligible for an initial three month military service contract. This process is overseen by various groups, all loosely united by their pro-Turkey alignment. The Syrian National Army (SNA), a pro-Turkish militia group that operates in northern Syria and Turkish military administrators spread across the buffer zone which straddles Turkey’s southern border, have both served to facilitate the recruitment of young Syrians. Documentation forgery, arranging payments to families and transporting boys to Turkey for basic training, now form part of an intricate and highly orchestrated process, one entirely denied by those complicit.
Upon reaching Turkey, Syrian boys are assigned to duty with a number of select units. The report by STJ identifies these as the Sultan Murad Division, the Mu’tasim Division and the Suleyman-Shah Brigade (also known as al-Amshat). Once the boys complete basic training with their new unit, they are transported to Libya via security contractors operating in partnership with the Turkish army. These ethnic Turkmen units now active in Libya have fought across northern Syria for a number of years, earning success with support and armaments provided by Turkey. Their recent foray into the Libyan civil war cannot have transpired without Ankara’s implicit foreknowledge and consent.
Various eyewitness accounts from the STJ report substantiate these claims.
A civilian from Marea, fifty kilometres north of Aleppo:
“During January 2020 – I cannot remember the exact date – a commander in the Mu’tasim Division came to my shop with three children. One of them said that he was displaced from al-Ghouta, in Damascus, while the other two children said that they were from the city of Aleppo. They were between 15 and 16 years of age, but they didn’t reveal their name. In the context of my conversation with them, they told me that they would go to Libya with the approval of their families.
They were very happy to receive a monthly salary of $3,000 dollars, according to what the leader promised. I asked one of them if he knew how to use a weapon, and he replied that he would learn all of this in the military camp where he would be with his peers. The camp was set by the Mu’tasim Division, and each group it trained consisted of 25 children, according to what one of the children said.”
“The commander prevented anyone from entering the shop, gave the children cigarettes and started talking to them about the financial return they would get, telling them that things will be fine, as going to Libya is easy and they will be able to contact their families and return here after three months with a big amount of money. He told the children that they can keep the full amount for themselves as in Libya they will not have to buy anything or spend any lira, since they will be provided cigarettes, food and housing.”
A former employee of Marea’s Personal Status Department (responsible for providing identity cards to Syrian citizens):
“We, at the Personal Status Department in Marea, used to issue identification cards for the fighters, based on the identification documents they already have. It could be the individual status records, issued by a mayor, or ID cards, issued by the Syrian Government. Actually, anyone can get a forged ID with false information easily for a little amount of money, especially in the city of A’zaz. Personally, I came across several forged documents containing false information regarding date and place of birth, that had been submitted by boys and girls in order to be allowed for recruitment or marriage.”
From a Syrian fighter stationed with the Sultan Murad Division in Tripoli:
“There are at least five children in my group, it is very clear that they are physically children. Likely, they came here through the armed groups that recruited them.
Reports as straightforward as these, clearly indicating the recruitment of children, have been hard to come by since the conflict’s rejuvenation in 2014. In a report compiled by this author in March, the challenge of identifying human rights abuses in Libya, especially the recruitment of minors, was clearly outlined. No party to the conflict in Libya wants to be openly recognised for deploying child combatants, for the risk of achieving international pariah status that this entails. An information blackout has been one of the few agreed upon tactics adopted by the GNA and General Khalifa Haftar’s LNA, stymying effective human rights monitoring across the country. However, it has long been assumed by informed observers that U18s have remained an integral component of the Libyan conflict. Whether that was during the fight against ISIS, or in the latest phase of conflict, the hallmarks of child recruitment have remained paradoxically intangible and omnipresent.
At the beginning of 2020 more concrete evidence of child soldiery began to come to light. In January, Jesrpress, an independent Syrian newspaper, reported that a 17-year-old from Hasakah had died in Libya whilst serving as a fighter with the Sultan Murad division. Images of his burial were posted on YouTube and his death was recognised across the Twittersphere. In conjunction with STJ’s revealing exposé of child recruitment within Syria, the case for Turkish war crimes in Libya begins to appear plausible.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who has studied Turkey’s approach to intervention in Syria, said it was hardly surprising children were being drawn into the Libyan conflict. “The force from which these fighters are dispatched, the so-called National Army [meaning the SNA], includes many minors in its ranks — boys with few years of schooling and no job prospects other than joining these factions in exchange for a salary,” Tsurkov told the Al-Monitor newspaper on May 8th. “A commander in one of these factions also told me previously that any boy who has gone through puberty is a man who can join,” she added.
The strategy behind this calculated geo-political move is clear, according to Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Deploying Syrian rebels to its proxy war allows Turkey to “score a double win,” whereby “Turkey momentarily gets rid of those that cause them problems in northern Syria while using them as cannon fodder to shift the tide in Libya.” This ruthless calculation encapsulates the foreign policy designs underpinning Recep Erdogan’s strong-man international image. The Turkish president has always maintained that a presence in Libya is necessary – because of the defense and maritime agreements signed with the Tripoli government in November of last year. However, involvement in Libya also represents a nod to history and the legacies of Ottoman Mediterranean dominance that Erdogan seeks to revitalise.
Therefore, although Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that it is guided by an ‘enduring objective to achieve “Peace at Home, Peace in the World”‘, one is left asking the question, “peace for whom?” Arguably Turkey has done little to secure peace in Libya, where its efforts have served to escalate an already chaotic civil war, worsen relations with Russia and inflame tensions between several key regional powers. Furthermore, the methods deemed acceptable by those orchestrating the conflict in Ankara appear increasingly unconcerned with peace. The widespread use of drones, foreign mercenaries and the recruitment of U18s all indicate a regime prepared to win at all costs, as opposed to one preoccupied with the preservation of human dignity, peace and human rights.
*as of yet, there are no reports of girls being recruited
