After the almost fourteen years of war that caused incalculable destruction in the country, more than half children at Syria at school age they are out of the education system, said the non-governmental organization Save the Children, which wants “urgent action to reintegrate them”.

“3.7 million children are out of school this year, more than half of school-age children,” Rasha Mahrez, director of the NGO’s Syria department, told AFP in an interview.

Many schools were destroyed, damaged or turned into reception centers for displaced people during the years of war that uprooted millions of people.

Some are still today “refuges” because of “the new wave of displacement,” he explained during the interview in Damascus, calling on the new de facto authorities to take “immediate action to reintegrate” the children into the education system.

According to UN estimates, more than 700,000 people have been displaced since the blitzkrieg of organizations led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, al-Qaeda’s former arm in Syria) began and led to the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad on the 8th of December.

The majority of children in Syria, or “7.5 million”, are in need of “immediate humanitarian assistance”, Ms Mahrez noted.

A fact that is due to “almost 14 years of war, natural disasters, the collapse of the economy”, as a result of which “children are deprived of their fundamental rights, including access to education”, he added.

Today, in the country still under Western sanctions, at least one in four Syrians lives in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank, and the deadly earthquake of 2023 made matters even worse.

The war also had a “huge impact, a traumatic impact” on children, said Rasha Mahrez, who said a large number of children were “born during the conflict” and some “became teenagers or young adults during the war years”.

The NGO estimates that 6.4 million of them need psychological support.

Ms. Mahrez also pointed out the impact of international sanctions, which had been imposed on Bashar al-Assad’s Syria after the war broke out, on humanitarian aid, saying that the one affected is “the Syrian people”.

The day before Sunday, the new de facto leader of Syria, Ahmad al-Sara, urged the administration of the US president-elect, who will take office on January 20, to proceed with the lifting of the sanctions imposed by Washington on the country.

“It is very difficult for everyone to continue to respond to the needs” of Syrians while sanctions remain in place, Ms. Mahrez noted.

The civil war, which broke out in 2011, triggered by the Assad regime’s bloody crackdown on protests with a central demand for the country’s democratization, has claimed the lives of more than half a million people and turned millions more into internally displaced persons or refugees.