Middle eastern kids do often look more mature than their European counterparts- believe me I know- parents working for UN in Lebanon.
I hear this a lot from British commentators, but in my experience, they don't. Middle Eastern and Central Asian teens tend to look a lot younger than western teens, particularly if they have lived through conflict.
In conflict zones, the food supply collapses. So you have a food shortage, particularly of protein, during key growth periods in a child's life. As a rule, these children then tend to be noticeably shorter and weaker than other children, the girls often have a delayed puberty, and they never quite catch up.
I spent the noughties teaching in the Middle East (I also taught Palestinian refugee children during an outbreak of conflict in Lebanon) and found the teens to be noticeably mentally and physically younger than European teens by quite a long way. 15 year old boys would look more like European 9/10 year olds, for example. Quite a lot of the girls would be under 5 foot at 13/14.
Again, the culture around childhood is very different to Europe and the West, and I would say that children tend to be kept younger for longer. My Lebanese pupils at 17/18 looked like 15/16 year olds with a bit of puppy fat.
My suspicions about this particular story are very similar to my suspicions about the handling of issues of asylum and migration for the last twenty years. The way these things have been handled seems designed to destroy the public's support for any kind of coherent and constructive asylum policy.
And one might ask why that is.