12/27/2016
Syria: Help for Aleppo must also reach Kurdish and other minorities
Refugees in Syrian Kurdistan suffer from cold spell (Press Release)
There are almost 400,000 refugees from Aleppo and Syria living in the region Afrin in Northern Syria, and the local population is going to a lot of effort to provide the necessary supplies. However, there is a serious lack of supplies. Photo: tatakis via iStock [icon picture]
The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) welcomes the decision of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development to help the civilian population of Aleppo. “The aid must reach all the needy people in and around Aleppo, even in the relatively small Kurdish area,” demanded Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East Consultant, in Göttingen on Tuesday. “It must be ensured that there won’t be any support for groups that promote radical Islam in Syria or that suppress the members of ethnic and religious minority groups such as the Assyrians/Aramaeans/Chaldeans, the Armenians, Christians, and the Yazids, forcing them to flee.” Further, the Federal Government should initiate talks with the Turkish government to put an end to the blockade of the border to northern Syria. According to the STP, there is a serious lack of supplies in Kurdish areas where many refugees are living. In the refugee camp “Robar” in the Kurdish region of Afrin, a 15-day-old baby died of hypothermia on the first day of Christmas. There has been snow in the mountainous regions for a while, and most of the refugees are living in tents or emergency shelters that can hardly be heated.
Also, Afrin is cut off from the outside world. Islamist militias have blocked the access roads on the Syrian side of the border, and the Turkish army refuses to let humanitarian aid deliveries pass the 100-kilometer-long border with the region. Refugee camp “Robar” is only 18 kilometers away from Turkey. “It would be easy for professional helpers to organize convoys with food, medicine, tents, blankets, and clothing from Turkey to Robar. Therfore, the Turkish government under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is partly responsible for the misery and the plight of the refugees and the local population,” criticized Sido.
According to estimates, there are almost 400,000 refugees from Aleppo and Syria living in the region, and the local population is going to a lot of effort to provide the necessary supplies. Most of the refugees are Sunni Arabs from Aleppo and the neighboring Arab regions. Afrin belongs to the so-called Autonomous Region of Rojava/Northern Syria, but is cut off from the rest of the Northern Syrian Kurdish region.
The German Federal Government has initiated an aid program worth 15 million Euros in order to provide help for the destroyed city of Aleppo. The program is supposed to ensure that about 1,000 Syrian doctors and nurses will be able to work in the region for 30 months. In addition, about 200 helpers are supposed to be trained in trauma management.
Header photo: tatakis via iStock
