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| UNRWA Archives |
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Thousands line up to receive United Nations food parcels at Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria south of the capital Damascus Jan. 18. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled parts of Aleppo, the country’s largest city, under heavy aerial bombardment by forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that leveled whole neighborhoods. Close to 90,000 have taken refuge in Kilis, Turkey, doubling the city’s population. Working-class neighborhoods in Aleppo, in and around Damascus and elsewhere have been pounded, including with barrel bombs that disperse deadly shrapnel over a wide area and take down buildings. The UN says that the Assad regime currently has some 800,000 Syrians under “starvation sieges,” hemmed inside their neighborhoods and denied food, medical supplies and other necessities. The number killed in the conflict has now passed 140,000, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Feb. 15. “These statistics do not include the fate of more than 180,000 people missing inside the regime’s prisons,” the Observatory said. The UN reports that there are now more than 2.4 million Syrian refugees registered with them: 932,000 in Lebanon, 574,000 in Jordan, 613,000 in Turkey, 223,000 in Iraq and 134,000 in Egypt. |
| — JOHN STUDER |