EU, UN seek boost in aid for Syria

$8B NEEDS TO BE RAISED TO HELP SYRIANS AFFECTED BY BLOODY CIVIL WAR, SAYS UN

The EU and UN yesterday began a two-day push to drum up fresh aid pledges for wartorn Syria and reinvigourate the faltering Geneva peace process as the conflict enters its eighth year.

Mark Lowcock, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), said resources for work inside Syria and with refugees in neighbouring countries were “desperately short.”

Donor countries, aid organisations and UN agencies are gathering in Brussels for the seventh annual conference on Syria’s future. The meeting comes in the wake of strikes by the United States, France and Britain on Syrian military installations, carried out in response to the alleged chemical weapons incident in Douma which has been widely blamed on Damascus.

EU officials hope to beat the $6 billion (Dh22 billion) pledged at last year’s gathering, as forces loyal to Bashar Al Assad launched a new offensive against Daesh entrenched in a southern district of Damascus.

The agency said $8 billion needs to be raised to help Syrians affected by the country’s bloody civil war.

The UN has warned that its own appeal for money for humanitarian work in Syria this year is less than a quarter funded, receiving less than $800 million of the $3.5 billion needed. “Within the resources we can plausibly expect to mobilise this year we cannot meet even all the urgent needs,” Mark Lowcock, the head of UN humanitarian agency OCHA said at the start of the conference.

“Our focus is now to ensure the 5.6 million people we assess as being in acute need inside Syria are made the focus.”

Some 6.1 million people are now internally displaced, more than five million have fled Syria and 13 million including six million children are in need of aid, according to the EU.

Clashes with Daesh

At least 18 pro-Syrian regime combatants have been killed in 24 hours of fighting in southern Damascus against Daesh, a monitor said yesterday. That brought to at least 52 the number of pro-government fighters killed in nearly a week of military operations against Yarmouk and adjacent Daesh-held neighbourhoods, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. It also said 35 Daesh militants were also killed.