The older woman told Human Rights Watch that the first time government soldiers and militias came to her village in South Sudan in 2015, all civilians were subject to attack. “The old men and women who couldn’t run were killed,” she said. “There was Gatpan Mut, for example, who was a little old, and Gatkui Jich, who couldn’t move, and many, many more whose names I can’t remember.”

Human Rights Watch research from 2013 to 2021 in 15 countries found that older people can experience the same abuses during armed conflict and other large-scale violence as younger people and in some circumstances face heightened risk related to their older age.

This report describes patterns of abuses against older people affected by armed conflict in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, South Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine. It also draws on the situation of serious protracted violence in two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, Myanmar security force atrocities against older ethnic Rohingya in Rakhine State, and the experiences of older refugees in Lebanon displaced by conflict in Syria. It also includes abuses against older people in the 2020 armed conflict in the ethnic-Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.