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Syrian Kids Use ‘Pokémon GO’ To Raise Awareness To Their Plight

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 21:17 PST, Jul 23, 2016

Pokémon GO is becoming a global sensation and despite the fact the game is not available in Syria, kids there have found a way to use the characters to highlight their problems.

While the world looks on at the U.S. presidential election frenzy, brutal terror attacks in Europe and the recent attempted coup in Turkey, Pokémon GO has been the one phenomenon making for more lighthearted news.

The app saw nearly 8 million downloads in the U.S. in its first week. Story after story tells of the crazy antics of people playing Pokémon GO, whether falling off cliffs, driving into police cars, accidentally crossing borders or even the possibility of losing our privacy, as it is reportedly a hacker’s dream come true.

As reported by the Washington Post, to make sure the world doesn’t forget about the children of Syria, the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office, an organization of pro-opposition journalist-activists, came up with the plan to use the new craze – along with its Twitter hashtag, #PokemonGO – to raise awareness to the poverty, displacement and constant near-violence suffered by these children on a daily basis.

There are reportedly 7.5 million children living inside and outside of Syria, with 4.29 million children in the country and a million of these living outside areas where aid workers regularly visit.

The Pokémon GO social media campaign aims to remind the world of what is happening to the children of Syria. Playing on the fact that users have to use a real-world location in order to capture the Pokémon, the campaign uses images of children in actual locations in Syria, with the characters digitally added. Captions to the images include phrases like, “I am from #Syria come to save me!!!”

Other images posted on Twitter show children holding what appear to be printed images of Pokémon characters, adding hashtags like #PrayforSyria or #PokemoninSyria. Backgrounds are often desolate or war-torn, and the children in the images are unsmiling.

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According to reports by UNICEF, over 80 percent of the 7.5 million Syrian children living in or outside of the country have been “harmed by war.” Among the five million Syrians that have fled the country, more than two million are children, many of them unaccompanied.

Access to education in Syria has plummeted, with 2.6 million children no longer in school. Access to health care and safe drinking water is scarce in the war-torn and battered country. To add to the problems of young people in Syria, UNICEF also states that problems like child labor and teen marriage have also increased.

As reported by CBS News, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has referred to what he terms the deliberate starvation of civilians in Syria as a “war crime.” In January this year, he urged both the Syrian government and the rebels to end the sieges.

While UNICEF and other aid groups have been calling for donations from the worldwide public to help the children, there has been little success or response.

It is hoped that the new campaign by the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office will help to jolt the general public into awareness of the children’s plight, using the privilege of being able to play smartphone games to show the stark truth of lack of shelter, no schooling and the dangers faced by Syria’s children.

[Photo by Hussein Malla/AP Images]

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