A/HRC/36/55 beliefs. During a similar attack on Al-Manbouja in 2015, ISIL militants killed up to 46 civilians, most of whom were also Ismaili Muslims. 9 46. Earlier this year, a group of hostages held by armed groups in Douma, in the Damascus countryside, for over three years was released in exchange for armed group fighters detained by government forces. On 11 December 2013, various armed groups, including Jaysh al-Islam and Ajnad al-Sham (currently part of the Faylaq ar-Rahman coalition) stormed the town of Adra al-Omaliyah in eastern Damascus. Numerous Alawite families, including young children, in addition to some Ismaili, Shia, Druze and Christian families, were ordered by fighters to stay in the basements of their apartment complexes, where they remained in de facto detention. Later, armed group members entered the basements to inquire about the backgrounds of male family members, at which point some civilians were intimidated, verbally assaulted and derogatorily referred to as “nusairis” by the fighters. Some of the civilians were informed five or six months later by armed group emirs that they would be “distributed” to different armed group factions, as they were considered war booty. 47. At the next detention site, relocated hostages recounted how men were separated from women and children, although members of Ajnad al-Sham reunited families under their control “once or twice a month��. Detained women described overhearing the brutal torture of male detainees. One Alawite woman who managed to escape the events of 11 December 2013 in Adra al-Omaliyah was contacted in August 2014 by an armed group representative who presented himself as the head of the “office of hostages”. The man claimed that her husband had been moved to Douma and then facilitated contact between her and her husband. Over the course of the next two and half years, she was able to communicate briefly with her husband on five occasions via mobile telephone. On one occasion, her husband sent her a picture of himself, in which he appeared to be “half of his weight”. Released hostages echoed that Faylaq ar-Rahman routinely denied them food and medical care. 48. Other hostages released in 2017 described how members of Ajnad al-Sham forced exhausted men to dig tunnels in besieged Douma for the groups to use as supply routes to eastern Ghouta (see para. 27 above). One woman recalled how her son was killed when government forces bombed out the tunnel he was digging in late August 2016. Some men were also forced to dig wells, while elderly men were exempt from labour. Up to 100 men from Adra al-Omaliyah belonging to minority religious groups remain in captivity as hostages, waiting to be swapped. Up to 175 women and children from Adra al-Omaliyah are still detained. IV. Impact of the conflict on children 49. Children throughout the Syrian Arab Republic remain disproportionally vulnerable to violence and abuse. The overwhelming impact of the conflict on civilians during the reporting period revealed that children remain victimized on multiple grounds, and continue to be denied the protection to which they are entitled under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the Syrian Arab Republic is party. Syrian children suffered as a consequence of attacks against civilians, lack of access to education, and their recruitment as child soldiers. For example, out of the 179 individuals killed during the chemical weapons attack in Khan Shaykhun and the suicide bombing in Al-Rashidin, 54 per cent of the deaths were of children. 50. On 7 March, at approximately 9.20 a.m., aerial bombardments carried out by proGovernment forces struck a primary school complex in Autaya, eastern Damascus, while classes were in session. Eight female students were injured, one in second grade who suffered head injuries. Less than one month later, on 2 April, the primary school was struck again, although no children were harmed. While the primary school is still standing, parents in Autaya now refuse to send their children to school fearing further air strikes. After the 4 9 10 See A/HRC/30/48 and Corr.1, para. 128.