Syrian child workers 'left behind in life'

Kilis, Turkey - On a bustling street in this city near the border with Syria, a tiny boy among other children peddling cigarettes tries to sell chocolate biscuits in a box. "Would you buy one?" he keeps asking, while pulling his loose, dirty trousers up to his thin waist.

Seven-year-old Atman Khalil is the youngest member of his family, having fled its war-torn hometown of Tariq al-Bab, in Aleppo, to take refuge in Turkey. Khalil's father is sick, and the family now depends on the children to provide for them.

With his 10-year-old sister Aysha, and cousin Suad Khalef, each child earns around $10 if they can sell all their biscuits.

"Three-thousand Syrian pounds ($20) a week, more than enough to provide [for] all [the] family in Syria. Here, [it's] not even [enough] to afford bread costs," says Suad's mother, Arifa Al Khalef.

The Khalil and Khalef families are only two of countless Syrian refugee families now living in Turkey.

Turkey's Disaster & Emergency Management office (AFAD), the government body responsible for Syrian refugees in Turkey, estimates that the number of Syrians in Turkey exceeded 900,000 as of April 2014. Approximately 220,000 live in refugee camps, while others are scattered in cities across the country.

Many Syrian refugees do not speak Turkish, making finding a job difficult. They also do not have legal status to work in Turkey, meaning that many end up in the informal labour market.

In the span of about two weeks, Al Jazeera met with nearly one hundred Syrian families in five different Turkish cities. Every family either had at least one child, aged between seven and 18, working, or else all the family members were unemployed.

AFAD did not respond to repeated Al Jazeera requests for comment on the conditions of Syrian children in Turkey. The United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF] works in close cooperation with the Turkish governmental body on the conditions of Syrian refugee children. Dr Ayman Abulaban, the UNICEF representative in Turkey, said at least 50 percent of Syrian refugees in Turkey are under 18.

"There are more than 80,000 children among the Syrian refugee population in Turkey who have had to leave school. Out of economic reasons, a lot of these children ended up working and became the [breadearners] of the family," Abulaban said.

Al Jazeera English