A PLEDGE to prevent the loss of a generation’s childhood in Syria has failed, World Vision said this week, as the 13th anniversary of the conflict passed (News, 1 April 2011).
Almost 7.5 million children in Syria were in need of humanitarian assistance — more than at any other time during the conflict, UNICEF reported last week. It listed “repeated cycles of violence and displacement, a devastating economic crisis and extreme deprivation, disease outbreaks and last year’s devastating earthquakes” among the challenges that they faced. It is estimated that more than 650,000 children under the age of five are chronically malnourished.
“The sad reality is that, today, and in the days ahead, many children in Syria will mark their 13th birthdays, becoming teenagers, knowing that their entire childhood to date has been marked by conflict, displacement and deprivation,” UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Adele Khodr, said.
Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-age children — some 2.4 million, aged from five to 17 — are out of school.
The strategy “No lost generation” was launched by UNICEF and World Vision in 2013. It brought together NGOs, donors, and governments in an effort to advocate for, and support, children in their needs after the outbreak of the war.
On Wednesday, Clynton Beukes, World Vision’s programme director for Syria response, said that efforts had failed. “There is a lost generation right now,” he said. “A generation that has been scarred by war. . . We have a generation of children who have not had a childhood.”
The current strategy was focused on building the resilience of children to cope with crises, he said. “You should never have to do that. . . At no point should you have a six-, seven-, eight-year-old having to deal with some of these things, but this is where we are. . . Frankly, I’m worried.”
The humanitarian situation in Syria was worse than it had ever been, he said. The number of people in need of help had “exploded” to 16.7 million — equivalent to the population of New Zealand. An “incredible” number of people were in need of nutrition. The average recipient of World Vision’s help lacked access to food and clean water, had been displaced by last year’s earthquake (News, 7 February 2023), and was probably sharing a tent with 12 or 13 others.
“We as an international community have failed Syria,” he said. After the earthquake, there had been a pledge of global solidarity, but “we have really failed to see any large-scale international funding coming to Syria.” Most of the funding came from private individuals. In the past year, the number of people supported by the World Food Programme had halved to one million.
More than 13 million Syrians — roughly half the pre-conflict population — are displaced inside or outside Syria and unable to return to their homes. UNICEF reports that humanitarian funding has reached an all-time low, both inside Syria itself and for Syrians in neighbouring countries. In 2023, only 37.4 per cent of the target was received.
In Lebanon — which has the largest number of refugees per capita and per square kilometre in the world — there are 1.5 million Syrian refugees. Last year, almost half of the school-age refugee children were not in school. Last week, Hombeline Dulière, CAFOD’s programme manager for the Syrian crisis response, recalled meeting a young woman, Baraa, aged 18, who had fled the war as a five-year-old. For two years, she had not attended a single day of school.
“We should not forget that Syria is the world’s worst displacement crisis,” Ms Dulière said. “There is now a whole generation who have never been able to live in their own country, have never been to school, and thousands who are still too afraid to return to their homes.”
This month, an advertising campaign, “Undo the damage”, was launched, on TV and billboards. Depicting a tent in a muddy field, it features a Syrian refugee listing his six children, with one on the way, and ends with the message: “Undo the damage. Before it’s too late.” It says that Syrian refugees make up 40 per cent of the population in Lebanon.
In January, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Cardinal Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, who leads the Maronite Church in Lebanon, called for the repatriation of Syrian refugees, The Tablet reported. “The refugees are getting free education, hospitals, and water and they don’t pay any taxes,” he said. “We are having to support them. This is the explosive reality. We are not against these people. They are living in misery. They need to go back to their own countries, but the international community is not helping.”
The UN Syria Commission of Inquiry, in a report published last week, warned that the country was experiencing a wave of violence not seen since 2020. “Syria, too, desperately needs a ceasefire,” the commission’s chair, Paulo Pinheiro, said. “More than 90 per cent now live in poverty, the economy is in freefall amid tightening sanctions, and increased lawlessness is fuelling predatory practices and extortion by armed forces and militia.”
Last week, Fr Basilios Gergeos, a priest at St Joseph’s Dwel’a in east Damascus, told the Roman Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need that 90 per cent of Syria’s citizens were “thinking of emigrating”. This would threaten disproportionately the country’s Christian community, now estimated at about 175,000 families. The charity’s partner, Sister Annie Demerjian, said that the exodus was being driven by dire poverty after more than a decade of war and rampant inflation. “After 13 years of suffering, people are tired. They have lost hope,” she said.
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