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A urgent new warning from Human Rights Watch (HRW) has drawn global attention to the grave danger facing nearly 5,700 men and boys transferred to Iraq from northeast Syria earlier this year, with the rights organization saying the group faces widespread abuse, unfair prosecutions, and even the threat of execution.

The detainees, who include more than 440 children as young as 12 years old, represent a diverse cross-section of nationalities: roughly 3,500 are Syrian, 2,200 are Iraqi, and the remaining come from 65 other countries around the world. For up to seven and a half years before their transfer between January 21 and February 12, 2026, the group was held in Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) facilities in northeast Syria, where conditions had already been documented as life-threatening. The sudden transfer was triggered by escalated fighting between the SDF and Damascus’ transitional government, which sparked widespread fears of mass jailbreaks that would allow detainees to reoffend. With only a few days’ advance notice to Iraqi authorities, U.S. military forces coordinated the transfer of all 5,704 detainees, moving them across the border by airlift and ground transport.

HRW’s assessment paints a grim picture of the risks the detainees now face in Iraq. Adult detainees face imminent prosecution in deeply flawed trials that regularly fail to meet international due process standards, with convictions often followed by mandatory death sentences. Multiple reports from inside Iraqi detention facilities confirm systemic torture, unsanitary living conditions, and preventable deaths in custody. Adding to the public health crisis, more than 1,100 transferred detainees arrived with serious contagious illnesses, including active tuberculosis, which can spread rapidly through overcrowded detention populations.

Letta Tayler, senior counterterrorism advisor at HRW, emphasized the dual responsibility of the international community and Iraqi authorities in a public statement. “The thousands of boys and men sent to Iraq deserve humane treatment and due process, just as the thousands of survivors of ISIS crimes deserve genuine justice,” Tayler said. “The international community shouldn’t leave Iraq to manage this immense responsibility on its own.”

The background of this crisis stretches back more than a decade, when the Islamic State group seized large swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria in 2014. Backed by a U.S.-led international coalition, Iraqi forces declared victory over the group’s territorial control in 2017, and the Islamic State lost its final remaining stronghold in Syria in 2019. For the seven years following that defeat, SDF forces held thousands of suspected IS affiliates in makeshift detention facilities, struggling with limited resources and mounting security pressure.

Iraq’s legal system has long faced criticism from global rights groups over its handling of terrorism cases. To date, Iraqi courts have handed down hundreds of death sentences and life imprisonment terms to people convicted of terrorism-related offenses, including hundreds of foreign citizens. These convictions are routinely issued after summary, unfair trials that fail to meet basic international fair trial standards. Just last week, Iraqi authorities executed 10 people convicted of terrorism charges under the country’s sweeping Anti-Terrorism Law Article 4, security and health officials confirmed to Agence France-Presse.

HRW is calling on foreign governments to step up and accept responsibility for their citizens held among the transferred detainees, urging widespread repatriation rather than leaving the group to face the well-documented risks of Iraq’s broken judicial system. The organization also emphasized that any response to terrorism must balance accountability for atrocities with respect for basic human rights, calling for systemic reform to ensure fair justice for both detainees and survivors of IS violence.

Since the full-scale escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Turkey has emerged as a key supplier of defensive military equipment to Kyiv, and a newly revealed transfer of advanced air defence systems highlights the depth of this military cooperation. Multiple anonymous sources familiar with the deal told independent outlet Middle East Eye that Ankara shipped a batch of Turkish-made Korkut anti-drone air defence systems to Ukraine earlier in 2024, granting Ukrainian forces the opportunity to field-test the new hardware while strengthening Ukraine’s air defence capabilities against Russian aerial attacks.

For 41-year-old Palestinian father Adham Heriz, every day for nearly three years has carried the same heavy, unfulfilled weight: the need to find, recover and give a proper burial to the family he lost in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City. That long, agonizing search reached a partial, bittersweet milestone last month, when civil defense crews recovered the remains of his 37-year-old wife Hiam — but the body of his 17-year-old eldest son Anas remains missing, swallowed by miles of collapsed concrete in eastern Gaza’s Al-Yarmouk neighborhood.

Hiam, Anas, and two of Heriz’s other daughters — 18-year-old Shahad and 15-year-old Dareen — were killed on October 25, 2023, when a massive wave of Israeli bombardment leveled the entire residential block where the family lived. The attack flattened 18 multi-story buildings holding roughly 175 occupied apartments, according to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Palestinian civil defense. Around 450 people, including doctors, academics, journalists, infants and children, were inside the structures when the strikes hit.

The intensity of the bombardment left an unprecedented scene of destruction. “There were people thrown by the explosion around 200 metres. Entire families were wiped out. Many dead bodies were completely disintegrated, leaving little or no trace behind because of the massive explosives used in the bombs,” Basal told Middle East Eye in an interview. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Israeli forces continued advancing and launching strikes on the area, leaving civil defense teams unable to conduct a full, systematic search. Most of their heavy machinery and excavation vehicles were also destroyed in the bombing, meaning crews could only recover 120 bodies in the initial response, leaving hundreds more trapped beneath thousands of tons of rubble.

Heriz, who lived with his seven-member family on the sixth floor of a seven-story apartment building, still carries sharp, searing memories of the day his life collapsed. The family had just finished lunch together; Hiam and two of their daughters had stepped into the kitchen to wash dishes when the first strike hit. “It was like a black cloud covering everything,” Heriz recalled. “I felt like I was flying and being thrown under the rubble with each strike. I could not hear anything. I could not breathe because of the bomb powder and dust.”

Though most of his bones were broken in the collapse, Heriz managed to pull himself free from the debris. He found his 8-year-old son Ahmed alive beside him, bleeding badly, and soon learned his two youngest daughters — 3-year-old Siwar and 10-year-old Dima — had also escaped, though both suffered serious injuries. Ahmed survived, but Hiam, Anas, Shahad and Dareen remained trapped. Heriz’s brother and his brother’s five family members were also killed in the strike. “People moved me to an ambulance while I was crying for my family under the rubble. ‘Forgive me, my children. I can’t pull you out. I can’t feel my hands; they are broken,’” he said.

Local search teams and residents were eventually able to recover the bodies of Shahad and Dareen, but the sheer volume of rubble left Hiam, Anas and dozens of other victims beyond reach. For years, Heriz and his relatives made repeated trips to the site, digging through debris by hand with no heavy machinery to move the larger chunks of concrete. He had largely lost hope of ever recovering his wife and son’s remains until last month, when Gaza civil defense launched a coordinated 20-day search operation in Al-Yarmouk, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, with excavation vehicles supplied by Egypt and fuel provided through the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Over three weeks of digging, crews recovered the remains of 105 people from the neighborhood’s rubble, including Hiam, Heriz’s brother, and his brother’s entire family. Heriz described the devastating small discoveries the team made as they cleared debris: “We found a less-than-one-year-old child in his crib beneath the rubble, still holding his milk pacifier in his hand. When his father saw him and identified him by the clothes he was wearing, he collapsed from the shock.” Across the 20-day operation, Heriz said crews recovered 37 dead children from the ruins of his former apartment building alone. Still, after sifting through tons of concrete, Anas’s body was nowhere to be found.

For other survivors of the October 25 attack, the long-delayed recovery operation has dragged traumatic, vivid memories back to the surface. Just hours before the bombardment, 21-year-old Abd Al Rahman Heriz had been sitting with relatives and neighbors in Al-Yarmouk, talking about their hope that the ongoing conflict would soon end with a ceasefire. He had just returned home to help his younger sister with a primary school math lesson when the bombing began.

His home was only partially damaged, sitting just a short distance from the 18 buildings leveled in the strike. When he and his family rushed outside, they could barely recognize the neighborhood they had grown up in. “The sky was black with dust, rubble and fire. Injured and killed people were everywhere. Houses were destroyed. There were no trees, no signs of anything,” Abd Al Rahman said. Outside his building, he found the body of a neighbor cut in half by the blast, a bundle of bread still lying at his side. Most of the relatives and neighbors he had been sitting with just hours earlier were killed, their bodies trapped under the ruins.

With civil defense teams blocked from entering the area by ongoing fighting, Abd Al Rahman and other local survivors used nothing but basic hand tools — hammers, shovels, metal cutters — to dig through rubble for days in search of survivors. “I remained for three days with many of my surviving neighbours, doing our best to help pull people out,” he recalled. The small team managed to pull two young sisters out alive; their father lay dead beside them, and the children cried for him as rescuers moved his body to an ambulance and tried to calm them. They also pulled a woman alive from the rubble after she had been trapped for three days. But as Israeli attacks intensified, the survivors were forced to flee, even as they could still hear voices calling for help from beneath the concrete.

“We could hear the voices of people who were still alive but trapped under the rubble, as well as the bodies of hundreds of others, including people of my extended family,” Abd Al Rahman said. The trauma of that experience has never faded. “I still have nightmares. I hear in my mind the voices of people calling for help: ‘Help us, pull us out.’ One girl was calling, ‘My sister is dead beside me. Pull her and me out.’”

Of the 105 remains recovered in the recent 20-day operation, 36 have not yet been identified. Basal, the civil defense spokesperson, explained that teams face enormous challenges identifying victims who have been buried for months. “They had reached an advanced stage of decomposition and their facial features were no longer recognisable. There is no DNA testing or any other means of identifying who they are,” he said.

The tragedy in Al-Yarmouk is just one small part of the broader humanitarian catastrophe unfolding across the Gaza Strip. Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has killed approximately 75,000 people to date, and official estimates suggest roughly 8,000 more people remain missing, still trapped beneath rubble across the enclave.

At just 17 years old, Ibrahim can expertly handle a Kalashnikov rifle. Unlike formally enlisted troops in Yemeni government-aligned forces, he fights alongside his older brother and male cousins as an informal volunteer, driven by a single goal: defending his home from advancing Houthi forces. “When the Houthis approached our village, dozens of local residents picked up personal weapons to push back, and I was among them,” he explained in an interview with Middle East Eye. Grabbing his father’s stored rifle, Ibrahim joined a local resistance cell aligned with official government forces. Growing up in Yemen, firearm familiarity came early: “We’ve kept a Kalashnikov in our home for years, and I’ve fired it at weddings and community gatherings before, so I knew how to use it,” he said. For Ibrahim, this fight is temporary. He has no ambition for a long-term military career, and plans to lay down his arms once his village is retaken to resume his studies, with the dream of one day working as an automotive engineer.

Ibrahim’s story is far from unique. Since the latest outbreak of large-scale fighting between Houthi rebels and Yemeni government forces, the widespread use of child soldiers has reemerged as a devastating feature of the country’s decade-long conflict, with both major warring parties trading accusations of underage recruitment to front lines and support roles. Neither side publicly acknowledges recruiting minors, but independent verification from the United Nations, international media, and regional human rights groups has confirmed the practice persists on both sides of the conflict.

A 2025 report from the UN Secretary-General on children and armed conflict documented 564 verified cases of child recruitment and deployment in Yemen between 2021 and 2023. Of these confirmed cases, 345 were linked to Houthi forces, while 210 were attributed to Yemeni national armed forces and their affiliated armed groups. The remaining small number of cases were traced to unidentified actors and the Yemen-based affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The UN confirmed the children recruited ranged in age from 8 to 17 years old. Of the total, 293 were deployed directly to combat roles, while 187 served in support positions including checkpoint guards, informants, and military drivers. Twenty-seven of the children sent into active combat were younger than 15 years old.

Ahmed, Ibrahim’s 41-year-old cousin who fights alongside him, pushed back against claims that the teen serves on the front lines. He explained Ibrahim only carries out support duties behind frontline troops, a role suited to his current skills and physical size. “Frontline combat demands experience that most teenagers don’t have; it’s not a role anyone can step into,” Ahmed told Middle East Eye. “Even so, fighters like Ibrahim provide critical backup for our main forces, and that support makes a real difference when circumstances are this desperate.”

Recent cases of underage participation have drawn international attention. Last month, as fighting intensified around the embattled city of Taiz, the BBC broadcast an interview with a 16-year-old fighter aligned with government forces who claimed he had taken part in active frontline combat. In response to the report, Colonel Abdul Basit al-Bahr, deputy head of the Moral Guidance Department at the Taiz Axis Command, told Middle East Eye the teenager was only accompanying his father and was never enlisted as a combatant for government forces. “Our armed forces have an explicit policy banning child recruitment; it is strictly forbidden to accept children into our ranks or push them into military operations,” al-Bahr said. He did, however, acknowledge that government forces regularly encounter children on battlefields, some as young as 10 years old. “We follow appropriate legal and humanitarian protocols for these children, and refer them to relevant authorities to resolve their situations in line with Yemeni law,” he added, noting that minors captured while fighting alongside Houthi forces are treated as vulnerable children rather than adult enemy combatants.

Independent Yemeni human rights group SAM Organisation for Rights and Liberties has documented an even larger scale of recruitment: the group recorded 11,310 cases of child recruitment across Yemen between 2014, when the current conflict escalated, and February 2023. More than half of those children – 6,269 – were between 8 and 11 years old, an age group developmentally unprepared for any form of conflict participation.

SAM president Tawfeeq al-Homaidi explained that the years-long economic collapse sparked by ongoing war has created fertile ground for armed groups to exploit vulnerable children and their families. “When a family loses all income, when the breadwinner stops getting paid, when a child is forced out of school because the conflict has closed education facilities, the small sum of cash, bag of food, or monthly stipend an armed group offers stops being a choice – it becomes a matter of basic survival for the whole family,” al-Homaidi said. In a September 2026 joint statement signed by 266 Yemeni human rights and civil society organizations, the Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedom condemned the Houthi movement for weaponizing extreme economic hardship to force minors onto the battlefield. “Children have borne the worst of these violations: forced recruitment, deployment to active battlefields, and exploitation of their needs and their families’ socioeconomic desperation through ideological and military indoctrination,” the statement read.

Yet al-Homaidi cautioned against reducing child recruitment solely to poverty, noting a wider range of driving factors. “Ideological mobilization, exploitation of school and summer camp programs, social and tribal pressure, the lure of status, personal weapons, and steady pay, interrupted schooling, and in some cases direct physical coercion – all of these play a role,” he explained. A recent Al Jazeera English investigation from Houthi-controlled northern Yemen revealed how armed groups lure children with tangible incentives: promises of a personal Kalashnikov rifle, a month of military training, and a monthly stipend equal to roughly $94 USD.

Al-Homaidi added that recent UN briefings on Yemen have repeatedly raised urgent alarms about Houthi-run summer camps, where thousands of children are exposed to military training and sectarian ideological indoctrination ahead of deployment. While Houthi forces have faced the majority of international scrutiny for the practice, al-Homaidi stressed that child recruitment is not limited to Houthi-held territory. “The UN has documented cases among government forces and their affiliated armed groups as well, even if the numbers are far smaller, and coercion is far less common,” he said.

As of 2026, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates more than 22 million Yemenis – nearly two-thirds of the country’s population – require urgent humanitarian assistance and protection, including 5.2 million people internally displaced by years of fighting. The latest resurgence of full-scale conflict has only created new openings for armed groups to draw children into fighting, whether through formal enlistment, informal local resistance cells, family pressure, or the overwhelming force of economic desperation. Under UN definitions, child recruitment extends far beyond formal military enlistment, encompassing any use of minors in combat or support military roles.

For Ibrahim, however, these formal definitions mean little. He does not see himself as a child soldier; he sees himself as a young Yemeni defending his home. “I’m here to take back our village,” he says. For the sake of Yemen’s children and the country’s future, human rights advocates warn, ending this cycle of exploitation will require both a ceasefire to end ongoing fighting and coordinated international action to address the economic collapse and systemic vulnerability that drive recruitment. (Note: All names of minors featured in this report have been changed at the request of sources to protect their safety.)