Stick Figures and Stunted Growth as Warring Syria Goes Hungry
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
At a Syrian refugee camp near
the border with Turkey, a boy, waiting in line for a hot meal, looked
inside a tent at stacks of bread. Millions in the war-torn nation are
suffering from hunger.
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: November 2, 2013
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Rana Obaid began her life less than two years ago in a
comfortable house draped with roses, the daughter of a grocer locally
famous for his rich homemade yogurt. But war and siege brought hunger so
quickly to their town near Damascus that when she died in September, at
19 months, her arms and legs were as thin as broomsticks.
Multimedia
The New York Times
Signs in Moadhamiya read, “Kneel or starve.”
Suspected cases of malnutrition are surfacing from areas held by the
rebels and the government.
In a nearby town, a woman with a son suffering from kidney failure makes
her children take turns eating on alternate days. In a village outside
Aleppo in northern Syria, people say they are living mainly on wild
greens.
Aid workers say that Syrian refugee children are arriving in northern
Lebanon thin and stunted, and that suspected malnutrition cases are
surfacing from rebel-held areas in northern Syria to government-held
suburbs south of Damascus.
Across Syria, a country that long prided itself on providing affordable
food to its people, international and domestic efforts to ensure basic
sustenance amid the chaos of war appear to be failing. Millions are
going hungry to varying degrees, and there is growing evidence that
acute malnutrition is contributing to relatively small but increasing
numbers of deaths, especially among small children, the wounded and the
sick, aid workers and nutrition experts say. The experts warn that if
the crisis continues into the winter, deaths from hunger and illness
could begin to dwarf deaths from violence, which has already killed well
over 100,000 people, and if the deprivation lasts longer, a generation
of Syrians risks stunted development.
“I didn’t expect to see that in Syria,” said Dr. Annie Sparrow, an
assistant professor and pediatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New
York, who examined Syrian refugee children in Lebanon and was shocked to
find many underweight for their height and age.
“It’s not accurate to say this is Somalia, but this is a critical
situation,” she said. “We have a middle-income country that is
transforming itself into something a lot more like Somalia.”
While the war has prevented a precise accounting of the number of people
affected, evidence of hunger abounds. The government is using siege and
starvation as a tactic of war in many areas, according to numerous aid
workers and residents, who say that soldiers at checkpoints confiscate
food supplies as small as grocery bags, treating the feeding of people
in strategic rebel-held areas as a crime. Rebel groups, too, are
blockading some government-held areas and harassing food convoys.
But even for those living in more accessible areas, what aid workers
call “food insecurity” is part of Syrians’ new baseline. Inflation has
made food unaffordable for many; fuel and flour shortages close some
bakeries, while government airstrikes target others; agricultural
production has been gutted. Though the World Food Program says it is
providing enough food for three million Syrians each month, its
officials say they can track only what is delivered to central depots in
various cities, not how widely or fairly it is distributed from there.
One aid worker — who, in a sign of the political challenges of
delivering aid in Syria, asked that his organization not be identified —
said he recently met Syrian health workers who reported a dozen cases
of apparent malnutrition in a government-held Damascus suburb. He
suspected that the situation could be far worse in rebel-held areas.
Lack of medical care and clean water exacerbates the problem. So does
the fact that Syrians have little experience diagnosing or treating
malnutrition. Particularly troubling, aid workers say, are reports of
mothers who stop breast feeding, unaware that it is the best way for
even a malnourished mother to keep her child alive.
Some aid groups are trying to train Syrian doctors to use simple tools
that measure upper arm circumference to assess malnutrition, as
convincing data on its prevalence could help spur a stronger
international response. Aid workers caution against overblown claims
that could discredit such efforts. Some government supporters even
dismissed the images of bone-thin children from blockaded areas as
propaganda after several thousand civilians were evacuated from the
encircled Damascus suburb of Moadhamiya in recent weeks, looking
exhausted, shellshocked and thin, but not on the verge of starving to
death.
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end quote from:
| New York Times | - |
BEIRUT,
Lebanon - Rana Obaid began her life less than two years ago in a
comfortable house draped with roses, the daughter of a grocer locally
famous for his rich homemade yogurt.
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