For years, Syria’s civil war has been a largely frozen conflict, with the country effectively divided into areas controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s Damascus government, various rebel groups, and Syrian Kurdish forces. .
But as the conflict enters its 14th year on Friday, it is observed that violence is on the rise again, while world attention is largely focused on other crises, such as Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine and the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. the story says.
In al-Nairab village, an enclave in northwestern rebel-held Idlib province, Ali al-Ahmad burns olive branches in his stove to warm his partially destroyed home.
Nearly 30,000 children in Syria are suffering from human rights violations, the Unaided Committee announces.
He lives in a house that was damaged by recent government shelling. It is said to be in better condition than many of the surrounding houses that were reduced to rubble. When a new bombing raid begins, he leaves for a while to stay in one of the nearby concentration camps until the situation calms down, allowing him to return and repair the damage.
“If we go back a day or two, they start shelling us,” he said. “We left for a few days and when we returned to the village, our house was destroyed.”
The United Nations aid agency, known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, announced this week that Syria has seen its worst wave of violence since October in 2020.
The Syrian civil war has entered its 14th year. The United Nations’ World Food Program estimates that more than 12 million Syrians do not have regular access to food. The World Food Program announced in December that it would end its main aid program to Syria in 2024. (AP photo)
The war, which has killed nearly 500,000 people and displaced half of its pre-war population of 23 million, began in March 2011 as peaceful protests against the Assad regime.
The protests were part of the Arab Spring uprisings that spread across much of the Middle East that year, and were met with brutal repression, and the uprisings quickly descended into a full-scale civil war, which ended with the intervention of foreign powers. It got even more complicated. There were forces on all sides of the conflict, and extremist groups were also on the rise, first the al-Qaeda-linked group and then the Islamic State group until its defeat in 2019.
Along with Iran, Russia has become Assad’s biggest ally in the war, with Turkey supporting a range of Syrian rebel groups and the United States supporting Syrian Kurdish forces in the fight against IS. Israel has carried out airstrikes targeting Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Syria.
For years, the war-torn country had become a stalemate on the battlefield.
The latest surge in violence began with a drone attack on a military academy graduation ceremony in the government-controlled city of Homs in October, which killed dozens of people.
The Syrian government and allied Russian forces then began shelling the rebel-held northwest, hitting “well-known and visible hospitals, schools, markets and internally displaced persons camps,” the commission said. said.
Elsewhere, Israeli attacks targeting Iran-linked targets in Syrian government-controlled areas have become increasingly frequent, sometimes hitting civilians as well. Turkey has stepped up attacks on U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria, while IS sleeper cell militants have launched sporadic attacks across the country.
Unrest has also erupted in rebel-held areas in recent weeks, with protests erupting in Idlib against the leadership of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the al-Qaeda affiliate that rules the region.
The conflict is intertwined in multiple layers, and there is no end in sight for Syria to resolve the crisis.
David Carden, the United Nations acting regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, said during a recent visit to northwestern Syria that the United Nations Humanitarian Response Plan for 2023 had called for more than $5 billion, but that only 38% of the funding had been requested. He said he did not accept it. This is the lowest level since the United Nations began its appeal.
“There are 4.2 million people in poverty in northwest Syria, 2 million of whom are children, and 1 million of whom are out of school,” he said. “This is a lost generation.”
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Compounding Syria’s misery was a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6, 2023, which killed more than 59,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Some 6,000 of those have been killed in Syria alone, mainly in the northwest, and most of the 4.5 million people rely on humanitarian aid to survive.
UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations are struggling to fund programs providing a lifeline in Syria, citing donor fatigue, the coronavirus pandemic and conflicts elsewhere in the region that have erupted in recent years. are doing.
The United Nations’ World Food Program estimates that more than 12 million Syrians do not have regular access to food, and announced in December that it would end its main aid program in Syria in 2024.
