The growing refugee crisis
THE STALEMATE in Syria can only mean the brewing refugee crisis could result in a regional humanitarian disaster. Over 1.2 million have been displaced so far with no signs of the wave of refugees flooding into Turkey, Jordan and other neighbouring countries ebbing any time soon.
Jordan has reached a point where it just does not have the means to handle the 70,000 refugees — estimates vary with some aid workers saying it could be as high as 160,000— pitching camp inside its borders. Amman, however, estimates that Syrians crossing into the country could swell to 250,000 placing its already strained resources under immense pressure.
As the air raids intensify, millions of war-weary Syrians have been compelled to take refuge in neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, pitching the entire region into uncertainty. In an appeal to the United Nations refugees’ agency, Jordan says that it now needs $700 million in aid to deal with the crisis on an urgent basis. Ankara has already expressed its annoyance over the influx of Kurds from Syria into its territory and the scenario is no different in Beirut and Baghdad. Last month was the bloodiest with as many as 4,000 killed and, according to the rebels, over 23,000 Syrians have died since protests began in March last year.
As Lahkdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy to Syria, rightly pointed out, the fighting and the bloodbath has to end to enable the process of rehabilitation to begin. If reports are to be believed, water and energy sources in almost all of the neighbouring border posts are under increasing strain, and aid agencies fear that it could, if the present stalemate exists, culminate into an unmitigated disaster. Similarly, what many in the region fear is that dissidents and rebels engaged in warfare with the regime in Damascus could end up making safe havens for themselves in neighbouring territories. The diaspora on the borders of strife-torn Syria is in need of being rescued, rehabilitated and reinstated. The region simply cannot afford a calamity of the kind that’s building up.