Jihadist cash lures Syrian refugees
As donor fatigue sets in, humanitarian aid is starting to run dry
BEIRUT Mohammad Deen, a Syrian refugee and father of six, struggles to find the money to meet his children’s needs and worries who else might step in with an offer to help.
“If Daesh approaches my son and gives him $300 US to fight with them, he would do it,” he said, using Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s Arabic acronym.
Deen lives in a dilapidated house in northern Lebanon, and he has no access to the dwindling international aid available to millions of displaced Syrians. Three of his children are disabled, while the son he’s especially concerned about is 18, in the target age group for jihadist recruiters.
As Syria’s war enters its fifth year, its refugees are fading deeper into the background. At a conference in Kuwait last week, countries promised more aid, but donor fatigue has left humanitarian organizations unable to help people, and that’s creating a chance for Islamist militants, who play a growing role in the conflict. This month, Islamic State and al-Nusra Front militants took over much of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.
“We take millions of youth in the heart of the Middle East and give them no hope, no education, no professional training, no jobs or a future,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former UN relief co-ordinator. “We still expect them not to radicalize? Of course they will radicalize.”
Syria’s conflict began in March 2011, with protests against President Bashar Assad, and spiralled into a war in which groups like Islamic State have come to dominate the opposition to Assad. The conflict has left at least 220,000 people dead and one million wounded, United Nations special envoy Staffan De Mistura said in January.
For 2015, almost $3 billion US is needed to help 12 million internally displaced Syrians, and another $5.5 billion to support 4.2 million refugees in nearby countries, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the lead group co-ordinating Syrian aid.
The biggest groups of refugees are in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, with others in Iraq and Egypt.
Last year, the agency could only meet half of the refugees’ needs, and it may not even reach that level in 2015, according to Daniel Endres, the UNCHR’s head of external relations. “We’re trying to do the reductions where it hurts least, but it will hurt,” Endres said in an interview in Dubai. Fewer aid dollars could force more children to drop out of school to work, and lead to the spread of malnutrition, he said.
The Islamic State offers monthly stipends of $400 for local fighters and $800 for foreign ones, as well as free housing, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It gets the houses from seized land, and the money from oil sales, extortion and robbery, among other sources, the OECD’s Financial Action Task Force said in February.
Last year, the U.S. led the Syria donor effort with $1.7 billion, the UN says. In the Middle East, Kuwait gave $300 million and Saudi Arabia $130 million. Those sums are dwarfed by the more than $30 billion the oil-rich Gulf countries have spent propping up Egypt’s economy after the army takeover in 2013.
On March 31, countries pledged $3.8 billion at a donors conference in Kuwait, though not all past promises have been met.
“The needs are growing by virtually every measure,” Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said at the Kuwait meeting. “Yet too many countries are giving the same amount, or even less than they have in the past.”
The U.S. pledged an additional $507 million and Kuwait $500 million. The United Arab Emirates promised about $100 million.
Donations have been scarce because the crisis “was much larger than expected,” Sheik Mohammad Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al- Sabah, minister of state for cabinet affairs in Kuwait, said in an interview.
In the countries hosting the refugees, the economic and social strains are growing.
Turkey has spent $5.5 billion on the almost two million Syrian refugees it hosts, and only got $250 million of external help, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last month. “The international community says, ‘what a great nation you are,’ but when it comes to money, they don’t reach into their pockets,” he said.
In Lebanon and Jordan, locals have complained about Syrians competing for water, education, medical treatment and jobs. Jordan hosts 1.4 million Syrians, about a fifth of them in camps. In Lebanon, the population of 4.5 million has swelled more than 25 per cent with the influx. The army has raided their informal settlements and arrested dozens suspected of ties to extremist groups.
Deen, the Syrian with six children, sums up the way some have turned to jihadist groups for money. “Whoever grows a beard gets a dollar,” he said. “While we are homeless and can’t even secure food for our families.”