Based on the years-long coordination and the cooperative relationship between the international KidsRights Foundation and the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), the SNHR this year nominated the Syrian girl Enar for the International Children’s Peace Prize for the year 2020, in appreciation of her exceptional efforts in conveying the suffering of the Syrian community, especially its children, due to the violations they have been exposed to by the Syrian regime and its Iranian and Russian allies. In this statement, we’re delighted to announce that Enar’s nomination has been accepted, along with nominations for 142 other exceptional male and female children from around the world, and express our hope that Enar will win the award for this year.
Enar – known as ‘Noor’ on social media – is a child from Damascus city who moved, along with her family, to live in Eastern Ghouta in Damascus Suburbs after the outbreak of the popular uprising for democracy in March 2011. Enar, who was 10 years old when she first began her reports, along with her younger sister Alaa, then 8 years old, filmed and broadcast a large number of photos and videos, in which she spoke not only about the suffering and deprivation that she and her family were exposed to, but also about those to which society as a whole was exposed in Eastern Ghouta, due to the crippling siege imposed by the Syrian regime between 2012 and April 2018, as well as reporting on the regime’s almost daily indiscriminate bombardment there with various types of weapons, including chemical weapons and barrel bombs. The two girls witnessed the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons attack on Eastern Ghouta in Damascus Suburbs on August 21, 2013, which resulted in the death by suffocation of 99 children (out of 1,144 people killed as a result of the chemical attack that targeted the Eastern and Western Ghoutas of Damascus), according to the SNHR’s database.
Enar filmed a number of videos, in which she showed the terrible destruction inflicted. As a child, she reported daily details that many adults would have struggled to document, most of which were horrific violations that she witnessed first-hand; despite the unimaginable suffering, her videos were not entirely without smiles and expressions of innocent childhood joy. In most of these videos, Enar spoke in English, as well as in Arabic, addressing the international community and the United Nations and repeatedly calling for the protection of children and civilians, and for the Syrian regime to be punished for all these crimes. Enar and her sister Alaa were interviewed by several international media outlets in their coverage of the events taking place in Eastern Ghouta.