Beirut, Lebanon — Living in a tent in rebel-held northwest Syria, Rudaina al-Salim and her family struggle to find enough water to drink and meet other basic needs like cooking and washing. Their camp north of the city of Idlib has not received any aid for six months.
“Before, we received food aid and hygiene items,” explains this mother of four children. “Now we haven’t had much for a long time. »
Al-Salim’s story is similar to that of many residents of this region of Syria, where most of the country’s 5.1 million people have been internally displaced – sometimes more than once – in the the country’s civil war, now in its 14th year, and are dependent on aid to survive.
United Nations agencies and international humanitarian organizations have struggled for years with shrinking budgets, made even worse by the coronavirus pandemic and conflicts elsewhere. The wars in Ukraine and Sudan, and more recently the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, are the center of global attention.
The war in Syria, which has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of the pre-war population of 23 million, has long been frozen, as have efforts to find a viable political solution for put an end to it. Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have fallen into poverty and struggle to access food and health care as the economy deteriorates on the country’s front lines.
Alongside deepening poverty, there is growing hostility in neighboring countries hosting Syrian refugees and grappling with crises themselves.
Aid organizations are now making their annual presentations to donors ahead of a fundraising conference for Syria in Brussels on Monday. But aid workers say promises are likely to be unfulfilled and further aid cuts will follow.
“We went from 5.5 million aid a year to about 1.5 million people in Syria,” Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, told the Associated Press. He spoke during a recent visit to Lebanon, which hosts nearly 780,000 registered Syrian refugees – and hundreds of thousands more undocumented.
“When I look around the world, this is the (aid) program that has shrunk the most in the shortest time,” Skau said.
So far, only 6% of the United Nations’ 2024 appeal for aid to Syria has been secured ahead of the European Union’s annual fundraising conference on Monday, humanitarian coordinator David Carden said. UN regional deputy for Syria.
For Syria’s northwest region, this means the UN is only able to feed 600,000 of the 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, meaning they have no access to sufficient food. According to the UN, some 12.9 million Syrians suffer from food insecurity across the country.
The UN hopes the Brussels conference can raise more than $4 billion in “vital aid” to help nearly two-thirds of the 16.7 million Syrians in need, both in this war-torn country. war than in neighboring countries, notably Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
At last year’s conference, donors pledged $10.3 billion – about $6 billion in grants and the rest in loans – just months after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Turkey and much of northern Syria, killing more than 59,000 people, including 6,000 in Syria.
For northwest Syria, an enclave under rebel control, aid “is literally a matter of life and death” this year, Carden told the AP during a recent visit to the province of Idlib. Without funding, 160 health establishments would close their doors by the end of June. he said.
The International Rescue Committee’s head of Syria, Tanya Evans, said needs are “at their highest level ever”, with increasing numbers of Syrians turning to child labor and going into debt to pay food and basic necessities.
In Lebanon, where nearly 90% of Syrian refugees live in poverty, they also face declining aid and growing resentment from the Lebanese, who have been struggling with their own country’s economic crisis since 2019. Disgruntled officials blamed refugees for increased crime and job competition. walk.
Lebanese feuding political parties have united to call for a crackdown on undocumented Syrian migrants and demand that refugees return to so-called “safe zones” in Syria.
United Nations agencies, human rights groups and Western governments say no such zones exist.
Um Omar, a Syrian refugee from Homs, works in a grocery store in Tripoli, a city in northern Lebanon – a poor community that once warmly welcomed Syrian refugees.
For her work, she brings home a packet of bread and a few vegetables every day to feed her family of five. They live for free in a tent on land owned by the grocery store owners.
“I have to leave the children early in the morning without breakfast so I can work,” she said, asking to be identified only by her nickname, which means “Omar’s mother” in Arabic. She fears reprisals due to the intensification of hostilities against the Syrians.
The reduction in UN aid they receive cannot pay the bills. Her husband, who shares her fears for their safety, worked as a day laborer but has rarely left their home for weeks.
She says deportation to Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s government is firmly established, would mean the death of her family.
“If my husband was sent back to Syria, he would either go to prison or be forcibly conscripted,” she explains.
Yet many in Lebanon tell his family: “You took our livelihood,” Um Omar said. There are also those who tell them they should leave, she added, so that the Lebanese “can finally take a break.”
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Albam reported from Harbnoush, Syria.
ABC News
