New signs of deprivation plaguing Syria’s war-ravaged civilians emerged on Tuesday, with the United Nations saying it is unable to feed a million hungry residents in combat zones and aid agencies reporting an outbreak of violence in a large refugee camp in Jordan, where a winter storm felled tents and left many frustrated inhabitants shivering in a cold rain.
Weather forecasters said another storm was threatening Syria and its neighbors with snow on Wednesday.
The World Food Program, the food agency of the United Nations, said that it was providing food to one and a half million people inside Syria this month but that as many as two and a half million needed help, mostly in areas made hazardous by fighting between insurgents and loyalist forces of President Bashar al-Assad.
“Our partners are overstretched, and there is no capacity to expand operations further,” said a World Food Program spokeswoman, Elizabeth Byrs, at the agency’s Geneva headquarters. “We need more implementing partners.”
She also said acute fuel shortages in Syria had delayed food deliveries and contributed to severe inflation in the price of bread because bakeries needed fuel for their ovens. In the contested city of Aleppo, for example, the price of a kilogram of bread is 250 Syrian pounds, or about $3.50, at least 50 percent higher than in other parts of Syria and at least six times more than its cost when the Syrian conflict began nearly two years ago.
The United Nations appealed last month for $1.5 billion in additional aid to handle the growing humanitarian crisis created by the Syrian conflict, which has left at least 60,000 people dead and is threatening to destabilize the Middle East. More than half a million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries, and the United Nations refugee agency has forecast a doubling of that number by the middle of 2013.
The most heavily burdened neighbors — Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon — have been persistently calling for more international aid, particularly during the cold winter months.
At the Zaatari refugee camp, which shelters 54,000 Syrians in northern Jordan, fighting erupted Tuesday during food distribution after a night of relentless rain inundated parts of the encampment. The number of injuries was unclear.
A statement by the Jordanian police said two aid workers had been hurt. Save the Children, one of the international groups that help the United Nations refugee agency administer the camp, said 11 people had been hurt, more than half of them Save the Children workers.
“The incident followed a night of heavy storms, during which torrential rains and high winds swept away tents and left parts of the camp flooded,” Save the Children said in a statement.
Mohammed Abu Asaker, a regional spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency, acknowledged weather-related problems at the camp, aggravated by a large number of new residents — roughly 9,000 arrivals in the past week.
“It is a difficult situation in the camp,” he said. “There is a frustration from the refugees.”
Ali Bibi, a liaison officer with the refugee agency, said the violence on Tuesday was the latest in a series of at least four clashes among refugees, aid workers and the police in recent weeks.
Melissa Fleming, the chief spokeswoman for the refugee agency in Geneva, said in an e-mail that most of the camp had withstood the rainfall and that aid workers were expediting efforts to move families into prefabricated housing. She attributed tensions among the camp population to “fears of worsening weather conditions, with some families rushing to occupy prefabs out of turn.”
One refugee, who described himself as a colonel in the Syrian Army before he defected, said that even though he was living in one of the prefabricated houses and covering himself with blankets, he could not stay warm.
“The tents are drenched. Kids are crying. Puddles of water are all over,” the refugee, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Mohamad, said in a telephone interview. “I am walking, my shoes are covered with rainwater. I can’t remember being so cold. I don’t even want to think about more than half of the camp living in tents. Something has to be done.”
In Syria on Tuesday, activists reported new violence in the Yarmouk district south of Damascus, a longtime Palestinian refugee encampment convulsed by fighting last month when insurgents temporarily seized control. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition group with a network of contacts in Syria, reported an unspecified number of casualties in the area, as well as shelling by the Syrian military aimed at insurgent pockets in other Damascus suburbs.
In a speech on Sunday, Mr. Assad, whose family has dominated Syria’s politics for four decades, denounced those fomenting the armed uprising against him as foreign stooges, rejected negotiations and instead offered his own plan for political changes, which critics said was meant to keep him in power.
His speech was denounced by the opposition, its Arab and Western supporters, and the United Nations secretary general. On Tuesday, the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former friend of Mr. Assad’s who has since become a strident foe, added his voice to the criticism.
“It is unimaginable to consider suggestions of a person who has killed his people with bombs, planes and shelling as democratic,” Turkey’s semiofficial Anatolian News Agency quoted Mr. Erdogan as saying.
Aid Groups Report Rising Misery Among Displaced Syrians
This article
Aid Groups Report Rising Misery Among Displaced Syrians
can be opened in url
http://newspretemporal.blogspot.com/2013/01/aid-groups-report-rising-misery-among.html
Aid Groups Report Rising Misery Among Displaced Syrians
