Home ›› 15 Jun 2023 ›› Asia Biz
Six months after she got the call informing her that her UN assistance would be cut, Najwa al-Jassem is struggling to feed her four children and pay rent for their tent in a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley.
She once received food rations and cash that covered most of their modest monthly expenses. The family now only gets the equivalent of $20 a month, which just covers the rent for their cramped tent.
Her husband gets only sporadic day labor and "my kids are too young for me to send them to work the fields," she told The Associated Press in the camp near the town of Bar Elias. "We're eating one meal a day."
Aid agencies will struggle to draw the world's attention back to the plight of Syrians like al-Jassem on Wednesday at an annual donor conference hosted by the European Union in Brussels for humanitarian aid to respond to the Syrian crisis.
Funding from the two-day conference will also go toward providing aid to Syrians within the war-torn country and to some 5.7 million Syrian refugees living in neighboring countries, particularly Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
This year, organizers aim to raise some $11.2 billion, though humanitarian officials acknowledged that pledges will likely fall short.
On Tuesday, a day before the conference, the World Food Program announced that it was faced with an "unprecedented funding crisis" and would cut aid to 2.5 million out of the 5.5 million people in Syria who had been receiving food assistance.
The conference comes as Syria's protracted uprising-turned-civil-conflict has entered its 13th year, and after a deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked large swaths of Syria in February, further compounding its misery. The World Bank estimated over $5 billion in damage s, as the quake destroyed homes and hospitals and further crippled Syria's poor power and water infrastructure.
It also comes at a politically precarious time for refugees living in neighboring countries. Syrian President Bashar Assad recently received a major political lifeline with the return of Damascus to the Arab League, and Syria's neighbors have, in return, called for a mass repatriation of refugees.
Anti-refugee rhetoric has surged in neighboring Lebanon and Turkey, both dealing with economic and political crises.
In Lebanon, where officials have put the blame for the country's economic crisis onto the country's estimated 1.5 million refugees, authorities have imposed curfews on refugees and restricted their ability to rent homes. Rights groups have said the Lebanese military has deported hundreds of Syrian refugees in recent months.
In Turkey, where Syrians were once welcomed with compassion, repatriation of the roughly 3.7 million refugees became a top theme in last month's presidential and parliamentary elections, which ended in a new term for incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan's government for years defended its open-door policy, but has in recent years been building housing developments in areas of northwestern Syria controlled by Ankara-backed Syrian opposition groups, with the stated aim of encouraging refugee returns. Ankara and Damascus have also been holding talks in Moscow to improve strained relations.
The government has also carried out sporadic forcible deportations, while Erdogan's challengers took a harder line, vowing to deport refugees en masse.
While some Syrian refugees have voluntarily returned from Turkey and Lebanon, most say the situation is too volatile.
At the camp in Lebanon, Fteim Al-Janoud struggled to hold back her tears as she talked about how she and her husband can only afford to send one of her six children to school. But the refugee from Syria's northern Aleppo province said the situation there is even worse, both in terms of security and material concerns.
