Report paints grim picture of kids’ lives in Syria

Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, painted a grim picture of life in Syria’s besieged cities, where young people have lost any hope for the future, living in constant fear of aerial bombardment and lacking access to food and proper medical care.

Save the Children said in a report published Tuesday that access to besieged areas by humanitarian organizations is virtually non-existent and only about 1 percent of food aid from the U.N. reached Syrians in besieged areas in 2015. About 250,000 children live in besieged areas, according to the report.

“Children have really lost any sense of the future,” Sonia Khush, the organization’s regional director for Syria told a news conference at U.N. headquarters on Monday.

She described a life in which parents and their children are surrounded by warring groups and access to medicine or physicians is limited or non-existent. Children “barely know what fresh fruits and vegetables are” because the government or other combatants have blocked access to them, Khush said.

Syria’s five-year war has killed at least a quarter million people and displaced half the country’s population.

[AP]

This entry was posted in Humanitarian Aid, International Cooperation by Grant Montgomery.