From Time: “The Yarmouk refugee camp, a Palestinian enclave in southern Damascus, has been under a grueling siege for months and its over 20,000 residents are cut off from vital supplies and endure chronic food shortages. Here’s the scene that met U.N. aid workers who reached the devastated area last month.”
In Oslo, Norway, a small boy sat shivering without a coat on a bench.
See what happened, and what it has to do with the children of Syria.
Julia Mathis has founded the Palmyra Relief Club at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, MD, US. The purpose of the club is to raise funds and awareness to support children wounded by the war in Syria, who have lost limbs, and are in need of prosthetic limbs and rehabilitative care.
There’s no better time than right now to support Palmyra Relief, and help children regain the mobility lost after losing a leg or arm.
MercyCorps has put together an excellent overview of the key facts about the Syrian refugee crisis.
A must read!
“With hopes for comprehensive peace talks in the immediate future nearly quashed, groups monitoring the ongoing crisis in Syria say more attention needs to be paid to the intractable dilemma of delivering humanitarian aid to the country.
More than nine million people currently require immediate assistance in Syria, the United Nations said recently, many of them suffering from a lack of food, water, and basic medical supplies as winter edges closer.
But aid workers cannot reach them, monitors say, largely because the Syrian government has restricted access…”
Read the full article in The Huffington Post.
For an in-depth understanding of the state of the humanitarian crisis — in this case, in the Syrian city of Aleppo, you can read this detailed Joint Rapid Assessment of Northern Syria – Aleppo City Assessment (PDF).
This SBS Dateline video interview features Dr. Saleyha Ahsan, an emergency doctor from London, talking about her experiences in Syria.
David Keen, in this 6 November 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, When ‘Do No Harm’ Hurts, makes an excellent point:
“…funding for humanitarian aid in Syria continues to fall far short of appeals, and opportunities for helping local councils and a variety of Syrian relief organizations continue to be missed. So too, crucially, does the opportunity for cross-border relief (notably from Turkey). As in most humanitarian emergencies, United Nations agencies have been putting their faith in delivering aid to rebel areas via government-held areas. But as happened so often in the past, the assumption of government cooperation has proved overly optimistic…
A 4 November 2013 article by Reuters says:
The United Nations estimates that around 9.3 million people in Syria or about 40 percent of the population need humanitarian assistance due to the country’s 2-1/2-year civil war, the U.N. humanitarian office said on Monday.
Palmyra Relief 