| New York Times | - |
GENEVA
- The United Nations appealed on Wednesday for $1.5 billion in new aid
to handle the humanitarian crisis created by mounting violence in Syria, and it predicted that the number of refugees would double to more than one million in the next six ...
U.N. Seeks New Aid for Syria Crisis and Predicts 1 Million Refugees by Mid-2013
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and RICK GLADSTONE
Published: December 19, 2012
GENEVA — The United Nations appealed on Wednesday for $1.5 billion in new aid to handle the humanitarian crisis created by mounting violence in Syria, and it predicted that the number of refugees would double to more than one million in the next six months.
Narciso Contreras/Associated Press
Running to safety on Monday after a mortar shell
landed in Aleppo, Syria. The country’s people are increasingly
desperate.
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The new estimate was at least the fourth time the United Nations had increased its refugee projections in the nearly two-year-old uprising against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, which has turned into a civil war that has left at least 40,000 people dead and has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.
The revised figures were issued as antigovernment activists and state
news media in Syria reported new mayhem in the capital, Damascus, and
other areas, and as Lebanese officials reported that Syria’s interior
minister, Mohamed al-Shaar, was in Beirut for emergency medical
treatment of injuries he suffered in a Dec. 12 bomb attack by insurgents
in Damascus. There was no confirmation from the Syrian government,
which had denied earlier reports that Mr. Shaar had been wounded.
Meeting representatives of donor governments here in Geneva, United
Nations agencies said they were seeking $1 billion to assist refugees in
neighboring countries and $519 million more to provide emergency aid to
four million people inside Syria — roughly 20 percent of the country’s
population.
The Syrian crisis was also a dominant theme of a year-end news
conference at the United Nations by Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general,
who said he planned to convene a donor conference next year to raise
additional aid. Mr. Ban thanked neighboring countries that had taken in
Syrian refugees, and for the first time he publicly called on Israel to
accept them as well. There was no immediate comment from Israel, which
remains technically in a state of war with Syria.
Mr. Ban reiterated his plea for an end to the violence. “We’re doing our
best to provide necessary humanitarian assistance,” he said. “We are
raising our voices, appealing to the international community.”
Panos Moumtzis,
the United Nations regional coordinator for Syrian refugees, said in a
statement from Geneva that the immensity of the crisis required “urgent
support from governments, businesses and private individuals.”
“Unless these funds come quickly, we will not be able to fully respond
to the lifesaving needs of civilians who flee Syria every hour of the
day,” he said.
More than 525,000 Syrians have registered as refugees, the United
Nations refugee agency reported, roughly double the number it had
recorded in early September. They include about 160,000 in Lebanon, 150,000 in Jordan, 140,000 in Turkey
and more than 65,000 in Iraq. The agency also included Egypt for the
first time as a sanctuary for Syrians, reporting that more than 10,000
had registered there.
Mr. Moumtzis said he based the increased forecast on present trends, with 2,000 to 3,000 Syrians crossing the border every day. Under a worst-case situation,
in which the conflict results in a massive exodus of civilians, the
number of refugees could rise to 1.85 million, he said.
As it is, “the violence in Syria is raging across the country; there are nearly no more safe areas where people can flee,” Radhouane Nouicer,
the coordinator of United Nations humanitarian aid, who is based in
Damascus, told journalists in Geneva, citing daily shelling and bombings
in the capital’s suburbs.
The needs of Syria’s increasingly desperate people, facing the winter
cold and shortages of basics like food, are much greater than the aid
sought by the United Nations could cover, Mr. Nouicer said, calling the
appeal a “realistic assessment of what we can achieve” in the complex
and dangerous conditions.
Among the immediate concerns is the fate of about half a million Palestinian refugees
in Syria, a legacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict, most of them living in
Damascus. An aerial assault by Syrian forces on Sunday against Yarmouk,
a Palestinian neighborhood in the south of the capital that had been
home to about 450,000 people, caused many to flee. More than 2,200
crossed into Lebanon, according to a security official there, while
others sought protection with relatives living elsewhere in Syria. But
the whereabouts of many of Yarmouk’s residents were unclear.
“We don’t know where they are,” said Martha Myers, director of relief and social services for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which administers aid to Palestinian refugees.
In Syria, the state-run SANA news agency
reported that military forces had attacked insurgent positions in and
around Damascus, Idlib and Hama, and had seized weapons and “eliminated a
number of terrorists,” the government’s generic term for Mr. Assad’s
armed opponents.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
a group based in Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria, said
much of the fighting on Wednesday was in districts next to Yarmouk,
which insurgents have sought to occupy as part of their stated intention
to seize control of the central part of the capital.
The observatory also reported that at least 11 people, most of them
rebel fighters, had been killed in a car bombing in the contested city
of Aleppo.
NBC News reported Wednesday that Ian Rivers, who had been working with
Richard Engel, the network’s chief foreign correspondent, had reached
safety in Turkey, ending an ordeal that began nearly a week earlier when
Mr. Engel’s team was abducted by unidentified gunmen in northern Syria.
The hostages escaped on Monday during a firefight between their
abductors and Syrian rebels, and all were safely escorted to Turkey
except for Mr. Rivers, who was separated during the escape.
In a statement announcing that Mr. Rivers was safe as well, the president of NBC News, Steve Capus,
said, “All of us at NBC News can breathe a huge sigh of relief and
express our deep appreciation to all who helped secure their freedom.”
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