I was born and raised in a war. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. The war was always just a few months older than I was.
I have lost friends and family to war. I have seen my neighbors’ dead bodies. I know how it feels to learn that a bomb blast has damaged your school; to sleep and live with the sounds of gunshots and explosions, the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks; to suddenly flee when your neighborhood is targeted; to seek shelter when nowhere is safe.
I am far from alone in this. Children have always been victims of war—of religious conflict, armed interventions, fights between autocracies and democracies. When war comes, children suffer. That doesn’t mean we should accept their suffering as part of the cost of war. It means that their suffering is horrifyingly common.
As a child, I was taught how to protect myself, how to find safe spots under tables when my school and home were under attack. My siblings, my friends, and I learned how to run and escape targeted zones. We learned how to protect ourselves when we didn’t have our parents and elders by our side. We knew which time of day our city might be bombed. We avoided taking certain roads, thought to be full of land mines, in the hope that we could keep all of our limbs, unlike our neighbors’ kids. We learned to cover our heads with our hands and lie down if there were explosions. We learned to stay away from the windows of our classrooms. Our day-to-day was a gamble; we had to win every day.
In 2020, Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, reported that an average of 25 children had been killed or injured in conflicts daily during the preceding 10 years; most of them were from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—poor nations with broken infrastructure and health-care systems, where millions of children live in nonstandard homes or tents, or on the streets. The First and Second World Wars were devastating for children. In the conflicts of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of children have been killed, wounded, kidnapped, beheaded, raped, recruited by armed forces, or brutally disabled, losing limbs, eyesight, hearing, skin, parts of their face. Girls, in particular, are targets for violence. Many children in war zones experience some mix of anxiety, depression, aggression, behavioral disorders, loneliness, insecurity, and psychosomatic symptoms, and engage in self-harm, according to Save the Children.
I knew war before I was 5 years old. I’ve known its horrors from as far back as I can remember. After two decades of conflict, I fled Afghanistan for America during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, as the Taliban returned to power. Because of the way the war fell apart, I was separated from my mother, my sister, and many other family members. The trauma is still with me. Even now that I live in a much safer country, I still feel scared.
My story is the experience of millions of children subject to war. Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that 1,500 children have been killed or injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded the country last year. The Israeli government has not said exactly how many children were among the approximately 1,400 people killed by Hamas on October 7, but we know that many were among the murdered. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described having seen images of a baby “riddled with bullets … young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms.” And officials have said that nearly 30 Israeli children are among the more than 200 people believed to have been taken hostage in Gaza. Of the thousands of Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s retaliatory air strikes on Gaza, more than 2,000 have been children, according to officials in Gaza. Approximately half of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents are children, and many of them did not have access to basic food, water, electricity, and medicine even before the war started, because of a blockade by Israel and Egypt. Now many of them lack safe shelter too, and the humanitarian situation is only getting worse.
In the mid-20th century, international humanitarian law was put in place to protect civilians, and in particular children and women, in war. But too often, that means little. I wish there were more laws and other support systems to save children around the world who live in war zones, and the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters who are protecting them.
Children are too young to protect themselves from war. Their trauma is not an individual issue; it is society’s job to keep them safe. When children suffer, we have failed as a society. We cannot save one child by killing another.