Red Cross and UN aid workers have started delivering life-saving relief to thousands of people in Syria’s three besieged areas who are at risk of starvation.
A humanitarian aid convoy with more than 40 trucks entered Monday for the first time since October 18, 2015 in Madaya (Syria), a Syrian town in the hands of Syrian rebels besieged for six months by the armed forces of Damascus . Foua and Kafraya, two Shiite localities besieged by the Syrian rebels, were also able to be supplied.
In a statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) thus indicates that it was able to begin “to distribute vital aid to thousands of people in the three besieged areas of Syria, within the framework of an operation carried out in collaboration with the Crescent Syrian Arab Red and the United Nations”.
This agreement between warring factions also allowed humanitarians to accurately describe the situation on the ground. After his visit to Madaya, the Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for example said he was “horrified” by what he saw there. The 42,000 inhabitants of this locality near Damascus and the Lebanese border, left to their own devices, are in fact at risk of starvation and are in a situation that everyone describes as “appalling”.
Eat grass to survive
In a teleconference from Damascus, Sajjad Malik indicated during a telephone press briefing on Tuesday in Geneva that these Syrian children were reduced to having to “pull grass to survive”. “Other children had almost nothing to eat except water mixed with spices,” he adds. “The bruised populations of this besieged city lacked absolutely everything,” he concludes.
The inter-agency convoy carrying products likely to save lives (food and nutritional foodstuffs, sanitary supplies, blankets, equipment to equip shelters, soaps) should therefore last a few days.
400,000 civilians trapped
And according to the United Nations, there are indeed many people to rescue, as at least 400,000 civilians are believed to be trapped in Syrian cities besieged by the army in Damascus or by rebel groups.
Worse still, twenty-three people have already died of starvation since December 1 in Madaya alone, the humanitarian association Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced on Friday. Among them, 6 were infants less than one month old.
To understand the urgency of action, MSF’s director of operations, Brice de Le Vingne, said in a statement that MSF medical staff in Madaya were before this humanitarian operation “forced to feed the children with pharmaceutical syrups, the only available source of sugar and energy”. “It’s an open-air prison. For nearly half of its inhabitants, there is no way to get in or out, just die there,” he lamented.
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