Since March 2011, when the conflict initially erupted, Syria has witnessed never-ending devastation and an ongoing displacement. Over five million Syrians have fled the country, about six million are internally displaced, and more than 13 million people are in desperate need of assistance.
The conflict is causing massive suffering to all men, women, and children, but fortunately, another UN humanitarian convoy was finally deployed inside Syria.
The UN announced last Friday that the aid delivery was successfully distributed to about 40,000 desperate people located in Rukban, a hard-to-reach desert camp near Syria’s southern border. This was only the second time where the UN managed to reach such remote areas within Syria, where at least eight children had recently died.
Many people in Syria are currently suffering from cold hard weather. The support they get from the UN relief aid deliveries is all they have to alleviate their conditions, struggling to survive the rain, snowfall, and freezing temperatures across the still war-torn nation.
Rukban is at least 300 kilometers away from the capital city, Damascus. It’s considered one of the last remaining remote and hard to access locations that is in constant need of regular aid from the UN and other partners. Unfortunately, the supply routes are usually blocked, and the majority of people living there are displaced women and children living in very hard conditions.
Conditions in the informal settlement, Rukban, continued to deteriorate since the last humanitarian relief convoy in November. The significant level of poverty and the lack of the basic goods led many families to actually end up collecting garbage and plastic waste to make a fire to cook or to keep themselves warm.
Since 2016, the UN has convened eight rounds of intra-Syrian talks in order to find a political solution to end this conflict peacefully. In 2017, UN-led humanitarian convoys reached 820,200 displaced Syrians. The UN-led Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan for 2018-2019 is to raise USD 4.4 billion to support over five million refugees living in neighboring countries, and about four million members of the host communities.
Currently, about 81 million USD have been raised so far, which has allowed the UN and its partners to help 1.2 million Syrians. The support is still ongoing to ensure that it can reach the people who need it the most in the country.