Last Sunday marked the fifth year of the Syrian conflict. The country is truly devastated. However, having excoriated the Syrian President Assad all the years - remember the accusation of using chemical weapons on his own people a few years back? - now the politicians in the West are talking of siding with Assad against the more evil IS. Nothing like a moral compass!
"As the civil war in Syria entered its fifth grim year on Sunday, humanitarian agencies say the world has abandoned or forgotten those suffering there. The numbers are hard to absorb: Roughly 220,000 killed; over 10 million or nearly half of the country's population displaced and in need of aid, about half of them children; and an estimated 4.6 million living under siege or in hard-to-access areas, including hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
Among those most painfully held hostage by the war are about 20,000 trapped residents of Yarmouk, just south of Damascus, which was long Syria's largest, safest Palestinian community and is now viewed by some as "the worst place on earth." Since the Nakba of 1948, over 150,000 Palestinians have fled to Yarmouk seeking, in turn, shelter, education, dignity, revolution, and these days - in rebel hands and under siege by Assad's government - food.
The U.N. and other humanitarian agencies say that with no access to the ravaged area, people, many of them children, are starving; women are dying in childbirth; thousands are suffering from malnutrition and lack of water, power and medical supplies. While the U.N.'s refugee agency was periodically able to deliver food and medicine there last year, they have been denied any access since December, rendering Yarmouk what one observer calls "Syria's Gaza...a prison from which there is no escape."
"As the civil war in Syria entered its fifth grim year on Sunday, humanitarian agencies say the world has abandoned or forgotten those suffering there. The numbers are hard to absorb: Roughly 220,000 killed; over 10 million or nearly half of the country's population displaced and in need of aid, about half of them children; and an estimated 4.6 million living under siege or in hard-to-access areas, including hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
Among those most painfully held hostage by the war are about 20,000 trapped residents of Yarmouk, just south of Damascus, which was long Syria's largest, safest Palestinian community and is now viewed by some as "the worst place on earth." Since the Nakba of 1948, over 150,000 Palestinians have fled to Yarmouk seeking, in turn, shelter, education, dignity, revolution, and these days - in rebel hands and under siege by Assad's government - food.
The U.N. and other humanitarian agencies say that with no access to the ravaged area, people, many of them children, are starving; women are dying in childbirth; thousands are suffering from malnutrition and lack of water, power and medical supplies. While the U.N.'s refugee agency was periodically able to deliver food and medicine there last year, they have been denied any access since December, rendering Yarmouk what one observer calls "Syria's Gaza...a prison from which there is no escape."
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