Click to expand Image A girl walks to school at an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in the northwestern Idlib province in Syria, near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, on January 6, 2023. © 2023 Rami al Sayed/AFP via Getty Images Syria’s 14-year conflict destroyed vast swathes of the country and killed hundreds of thousands, but it also left behind over 1.5 million Syrians with war-caused disabilities.Syria’s minister of social affairs, Hind Kabawat, acknowledged this dire situation on June 9 at a UN meeting on the rights of persons with disabilities in New York, calling on international partners to scale up support for rehabilitation and disability rights programs.Prioritizing disability rights is a positive signal from a new government still finding its footing, and the needs Kabawat described are real and well-documented: nearly 28 percent of Syrians have a disability, almost double the global average.Human Rights Watch’s 2022 report, “It Was Really Hard to Protect Myself,” found that children with disabilities in Syria faced compounding failures during the fighting: they could not flee attacks safely, they were shut out of schools, and humanitarian programs routinely have overlooked them.One 18-year-old we interviewed in 2022 had lost her leg in an airstrike five years earlier and still had no prosthetic. She told us she often refused to evacuate during attacks because it was too dangerous to run on crutches. A father told us he could no longer afford hearing aids for his daughter after losing his job and home to the war. Of the 34 children we spoke to, only 1 child was attending school at the time.Humanitarian operations largely failed these kids. Children with disabilities were routinely excluded from mainstream programs, received inadequate aid, and lost access to services when funding started to dry up. Aid workers admitted they hadn’t been trained on disability inclusion.Minister Kabawat’s voice on the global stage is exactly the kind of advocacy that can shift attention. Syria’s new government should now make a firm commitment by developing a national disability strategy with concrete timelines that ensures schools are accessible, teachers are trained, and disability inclusion is built into new civil defense and emergency structures.International donors and UN agencies should likewise ensure disability inclusion is built into reconstruction planning and commit to collecting disaggregated data on children with disabilities so gaps in aid delivery are visible and accountable.Minister Kabawat’s call gives reason for cautious hope. International partners should meet it with resources, and Syria’s new government should back it with policy.