Between 1992 and 1995, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina tore through communities with a ferocity that left no part of society untouched — least of all its children. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) documented more than 200,000 deaths during the conflict. Among them were at least 12,000 children. These were not abstract statistics. They were boys and girls who lived in apartment blocks, attended schools, and played in the same streets that became killing grounds.
Sarajevo, the capital and largest city, became the epicenter of childhood suffering. UNICEF reported that between 65,000 and 80,000 children in the city had been directly shot at by snipers. Many witnessed people being killed in front of them — including their own family members. Studies of children who survived the siege showed that those from large cities, and those who had witnessed death, injury, or torture within their own families, carried the heaviest psychological burden. Older children showed more symptoms than younger ones, but no group was spared.
Hospitals across Sarajevo were overwhelmed. Children arrived with shrapnel wounds, bullet injuries, burns, and limbs destroyed by mortar blasts. Many had been hurt simply by being in their homes when shells struck nearby buildings. Kerosene lamps — used because the city’s electricity supply was routinely cut — became a hazard of their own, adding to the list of ways the war found children even in their most private spaces.
Survival in a besieged city reshaped what childhood looked like. Boys collected spent cartridge casings from the streets. Children ran errands in neighborhoods where snipers held steady aim on open ground. Bread lines required courage — or desperation — that no child should need.
Separation from family was one of the war’s most common wounds. Thousands of children lost contact with parents — some permanently. Mirza Mangajic, a 10-year-old Muslim boy from Sarajevo’s Old Town quarter, survived with only his grandmother. He had no news of his parents or sisters. He was not an exception. Across the country, grandparents took in grandchildren whose parents had been killed, conscripted, or simply lost to the chaos of displacement.
Srebrenica was under siege long before the 1995 massacre that the world eventually acknowledged as genocide. As early as 1993, malnourished and wounded children were being evacuated from the enclave on trucks, some lying on makeshift beds, too weak to sit upright. Medical care inside Srebrenica was nearly nonexistent. Children arrived at refugee camps and field hospitals in states of severe malnutrition, and outbreaks of measles spread rapidly through the crowded, unsanitary conditions.
The physical destruction of Sarajevo was total in many neighborhoods. Apartment blocks were gutted by shells, their walls blown open, their roofs caved in. Families who had nowhere else to go lived in the ruins. Children played in rubble because there was nowhere else to play.
Refugee camps offered shelter, but little comfort. Families who had walked for days through dangerous terrain arrived exhausted and traumatized. Grandparents clutched grandchildren. Mothers carried infants across fields and through forests to reach UN-protected zones. The journey itself claimed lives. Those who made it faced overcrowded camps with limited food and medicine.
The Bihac enclave, like Srebrenica, became a site of prolonged siege. Seven-year-old Sanja, Serbian Orthodox, and four-year-old Aladdin, Muslim, each lost a leg there. They were on opposite sides of the conflict’s ethnic lines — and yet their injuries, their losses, and their hospital beds looked the same. Land mines and shrapnel did not distinguish between ethnicities or ages.
Mortar bombardments sent civilians scrambling into cellars for hours at a time. In the darkness underground, neighbors became substitutes for absent parents. Children were held by whoever was closest when the shells began to fall.
War normalized weapons in ways that were immediately visible. Boys dressed in army uniforms and handled real firearms. The line between play and combat dissolved in a city where fighting was a constant backdrop. Some of these boys would later serve in the conflict before they were old enough to have finished school.
Mirza Mangajic carried a long scar across his belly from a grenade explosion. He prayed with his grandmother. He waited for news of his family that never came. His story repeated itself in thousands of variations across Sarajevo and beyond.
Some injured children were evacuated to hospitals in Western Europe when their injuries exceeded what Sarajevo’s overwhelmed medical staff could treat. A memorial unveiled on May 9, 2010, in Sarajevo lists the names of 521 children killed during the siege alone. Each name represents a child who was shot, shelled, or otherwise killed in a city that the world watched under siege for nearly four years.
Certain streets and public squares in Sarajevo were known killing zones, yet people — including children — had to cross them to survive. The area known as Heroes Square earned its name from the constant danger that defined it. Sniper Alley was perhaps the most notorious stretch, where snipers from surrounding hills fired into crowds. It was on Sniper Alley that seven-year-old Nermin Divovic was shot in the head on November 18, 1994. UN firefighters arrived within minutes. He died immediately.
Evacuation brought its own grief. Families were split apart at bus doors and truck tailgates. Fathers pressed their hands against glass as vehicles pulled away carrying their children to safety — not knowing if they would ever see each other again. For many, they would not.
Among the least-told stories of the war are those of children born from wartime rape. It is estimated that between 25,000 and 50,000 women and girls were raped by enemy soldiers during the conflict. A small number of rapes were also committed by foreign soldiers serving with UN peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. The children born from these assaults grew up largely without knowledge of their origins. Stigma surrounding rape victims kept most of these stories buried for decades.
By July 1995, after the fall of Srebrenica, thousands of women and children flooded into Tuzla’s airport refugee camp. The men and boys of the enclave had been separated from their families and executed. The women and children who survived carried with them the knowledge of what had happened — and the near-certain loss of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons.
Psychiatric clinics and trauma centers struggled to respond to the scale of psychological damage the war produced. Children who had witnessed executions, survived sniper fire, lost limbs, or spent years in besieged cities required long-term care that the country’s shattered health system was barely able to provide.
