THREAD: Today I'm releasing one of the most troubling stories I've worked on. It's about 3 young Afghans, the war in Syria & Moria's asylum lottery 1/13 newsdeeply.com/refugees/artic…
The boys' stories are the 1st personal accounts of child soldiers pressed by Iran into the war in Syria. Lied to, threatened with prison & sent to the frontline of a foreign war. 2/13
Mosa: 'I didn’t even know where we were exactly, somewhere in the mountains in a foreign country. I was scared all the time. Every time I saw a friend dying in front of my eyes I was thinking I would be next.' 3/13
Boys, some as young as 14, were drugged with Tramadol & used as shock troops in the Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade against ISIS. Their 3 stories have been corroborated by 2 more child soldiers. 4/13
The boys discovered that the promises of a residence permit & status for their families in Iran were lies. Bodies of dead Fatemiyoun were often left in Syria. 5/13
All 3 saw close friends die. Watched other terrified kids wound themselves to escape the war & eventually decided to escape while on leave in Iran, using smugglers 6/13
Reaching Greece hasn't meant finding protection. All 3 have found themselves in Moria, Europe's most notorious asylum camp. 7/13
The incomplete documents they fought for in Syria falsely show them as older than they are. This was done to hide Iran's use of child soldiers. 8/13
The Moria age assessment failed to pick up that the boys were minors & one of them has spent more than a year in the general population. 9/13
Heavily traumatized children have been left in a camp where conditions are so awful they're prompting suicides & mental breakdowns among previously healthy. 10/13
Their asylum applications show high levels of subjectivity in a system increasingly bent on refusing Afghans protection. 11/13
Serving European asylum officer admits to huge 'pressure to go faster' and sense that 'world is closing its doors' to asylum seekers. 12/13
Some of these traumatised minors, Afghans born in Iran, now face prospect of being deported from EU to Afghanistan, a country they've never been to. 13/13 newsdeeply.com/refugees/artic…
This report was only possible because of months of thoughtful work by @barbamou
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