Published: Sunday, May 26, 2024
BEIRUT (Lebanon) — The mother of four said, “We used get food aid and hygiene items.” “Now, we haven’t received much for a long time.”
Al-Salim’s story is like many others in this part of Syria. Most of the 5.1 millions people in this area have been internally displace — some even more than once — during the civil war that has raged for 14 years and are dependent on aid.
Since years, U.N. agencies as well as international humanitarian organizations have struggled to maintain their budgets. The coronavirus outbreak and other conflicts also made matters worse. World attention is focused on the wars in Ukraine, Sudan and most recently Israel’s conflict with Hamas.
The war in Syria, which has claimed the lives of nearly half a milllion people and forced half of the 23 million inhabitants of Syria to flee, has been largely frozen for years. Likewise, efforts to find an end to it have also remained frozen. As the economy continues to deteriorate, millions of Syrians are forced into poverty and have difficulty accessing health care and food.
As poverty deepens, so does hostility among neighboring countries who host Syrian refugees as they struggle to deal with their own crises.
Aid organizations have begun their annual appeals to donors in advance of the fundraising conference for Syria that will be held on Monday in Brussels. Humanitarian workers, however, believe that pledges are likely to fall short of what is needed and that more aid cuts will follow.
Carl Skau told The Associated Press that the U.N. World Food Program has reduced its assistance to 5.5 million Syrians a year, down from 1.5 million. During a recent trip to Lebanon, where there are almost 780,000 Syrian refugees registered and many more who have no documentation.
Skau stated, “When I take a look at the whole world, it is this (aid) program which has shrunk most rapidly in the shortest time period.”
David Carden said that only 6% of the United Nations appeal for Syria aid in 2024 had been raised so far ahead of the annual fundraising conference on Monday organized by the European Union.
In the northwest region of Syria, the U.N. can only feed 600,000 of the 3.6 millions people who are food insecure, which means they do not have access to enough food. According to the U.N., 12.9 million Syrians face food insecurity across the entire country.
The U.N. hopes that the Brussels conference will raise more than 4 billion dollars in “lifesaving assistance” to support nearly two thirds of the 16,7 million Syrians who are in need both in the war-torn nation and its neighboring countries.
Last year, at the conference, donors pledged $10 billion, with about $6 billion as grants and the remainder in loans. This was just a few months after an earthquake of 7.8 magnitude struck Turkey and northern Syria killing more than 59,000 people.
Carden, who recently visited the province of Idlib in northwestern Syria and an enclave controlled by rebels, told the AP that aid is “literally a matter life or death” for this year. He said that without funding, 160 of the health facilities in Idlib province would be closed by June 30.
Tanya Evans said that the needs of Syrians are “at an all-time high,” as more and more Syrians turn to child labor to earn money and take on debts to buy food and basic necessities.
They also have to deal with a dwindling aid budget and a growing resentment of the Lebanese who are struggling in their own economic crisis. Officials who are disgruntled have accused refugees of escalating crime and competition on the job market.
Lebanon’s political parties, which are often at odds with each other, have come together to demand a crackdown against undocumented Syrian migrants. They also want refugees to return home to the so-called safe zones in Syria.
U.N. agencies and human rights groups, as well as Western governments, say that there are no such zones.
Um Omar, an exiled Syrian from Homs who fled to Lebanon, works at a grocery in Tripoli, a poor city in northern Lebanese that welcomed Syrian refugees in the past.
She gets to take home a bag of bread every day and some vegetables for her five-person family. The family lives in a tent for free on land owned by the owners of the grocery store.
She asked to only be identified by her Arabic nickname for “Omar’s mother” because she feared reprisals due to the increased hostilities towards Syrians.
They cannot pay their bills with the shrinking U.N. assistance. Her husband, who also shares her concerns for their safety used to be a day worker but has barely left the house in recent weeks.
She claims that deportation to Syria where President Bashar al-Assad’s government has a firm grip on power would be disastrous for her and her family.
She explains that if her husband is returned to Syria he will either be sent to prison or forced into military service.
Um Omar stated that many people in Lebanon still tell her family “you stole our livelihoods.” She added that there are those who say they should leave so the Lebanese can “finally catch a break.”
___
Albam reports from Harbnoush in Syria.