Syrian child: "There is no love left in Syria"

Evil has taken over, dear children of the Middle East. 

The documentary by Lyse Doucet should be out on YouTube any day now.  I wasn't able to grab it from the BBC website as it has been restricted for viewing outside the UK.

Sam Wollaston writing at TheGuardian: 
Lyse Doucet's film   showed the tragedy and horror of traumatised and pessimistic children mixed up in conflict. But hard as it was to watch, they deserve our attention
You might think the timing of Children of Syria (BBC2) is unfortunate, given that the world's focus right now is on the children of another conflict, a little to the south. Not a bit of it. This simply further rams home the terrible, terrible sadness of children caught up in conflict. A "war on childhood", Lyse Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, calls the war in Syria, though she might easily be talking about Gaza too.



It's not an easy watch. Doucet's commentary is weighed down with tragedy and horror, an artillery barrage of gloom, every line delivered as if trying to outdo the last in the misery stakes. "Hope and innocence has been lost … How does a child begin to understand when they see their parents bent over by the sheer exhaustion of simply surviving another day … The bodies of two children are brought out in sacks … their brother was mortally wounded, their mother decapitated."

There simply is no good news. Even a rare glimmer of niceness and normality is relative and tarnished. "Just over the sound of the children's laughter, there's the constant sound of artillery, gunfire, explosions in the distance," says Doucet. Boom, boom, boom.

Its devastation is cinematic and beautifully shot, if it is not too wrong to talk of beauty here. Besieged Yarmouk, in Damascus, and Homs look like something between Hiroshima and a kind of Mad Max dystopia. They are not places you'd want to see in the real world, not in the 21st century, anyway. Only the pigeons – swooping about the minarets, free to fly where they please and unaware that peace on the ground here ended four years ago – look happy.

But of course, it's the children themselves who linger longest in the mind. The darting eyes of Kifah, 13, betray the trauma he has experienced. His face collapses as he tells Doucet: "There is no bread." At which point, the journalist turns comforter, reaching out to put a hand on the boy's shoulder. Later, she holds the wrist of a mother who is losing all hope, and tenderly, if a bit awkwardly, strokes her hand.

Another little girl with sad eyes tells her about eating a cat, and about knowing the names of weapons instead of learning to read and write. And 11-year-old Daad talks of her nightmares. "I hate the future so much," she says. No 11-year-old should hate the future.

Robbed of their education, their childhood, innocence and optimism, they've had to grow up too fast and now speak way beyond their years. "A child has the right to learn and to play," says Daad. "Families have a right to a home, to learn, eat and drink. There is no love left in Syria."

"I'm only a child in age and appearance but in terms of morals and humanity, I'm not," says Ezadine, one of 1.5 million displaced kids, at a container camp just over the Turkish border. "In the past, a 12-year-old was considered young; now at 12 years old you must go for jihad." Ezadine is 10.

It's not just an early pessimistic wisdom these kids have acquired. They have learned to hate, and to spout the propaganda and deep-rooted prejudices of their parents. It's hard to see much hope when a 10-year-old is talking of jihad, and of burying the enemy in mass graves, with the blessing of his father...........