Items, hope delivered to Syrian children
Lakeside High School alumni traveled to Turkey last week to deliver letters and teddy bears made by local students for Syrian refugee orphans.
Mouaz Moustafa and Natalie Larrison, both alumni of Lakeside and the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, represented the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which Moustafa helped found in 2012. He now serves as executive director, and Larrison joined the organization in early 2016 as director of outreach.
They met orphans and refugee families less than 30 miles from Syria’s northern border. The SETF operates the The Wisdom House Project school and orphanage in the Idlib Governorate province in northwest Syria.
Larrison established the SETF’s Letters of Hope program in which Americans can write letters of support to be delivered to the children of Syria. Peggy Schaeffer, library media center aide at Lakeside High School, helped organize a student effort last month to prepare stuffed bears to be included with letters. The letters and stuffed
animals were transported into Syria by a local council member from a village in Idlib.
Moustafa and Larrison visited a rehabilitation center for children burned and maimed by the bombardment of their refugee camp by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. More than a dozen Syrian civilian medical facilities were reportedly bombed in April.
More than 480,000 Syrians are estimated to have died since the war began in early 2011 and more than half the country’s previous population of more than 22 million have been displaced by the conflict. At least 4-6 million refugees fled the country and as many as 300,000 are estimated to remain in custody as political prisoners.
Assad’s regime and the allied Russian Air Force are accused of attacking many civilian residential and medical facilities during the civil war. They reportedly attacked using the “double tap” technique in which bombs are dropped again after first responders arrive.
The Syria Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, reported at least eight first responders were killed in airstrikes on April 29 in the Hama Governorate province, which neighbors Idlib to the south in northwestern Syria. The airstrikes hit the rescuers’ center in Kafr Zita and civilians who rushed to the scene to help were also struck, according to the White Helmets.
The Wisdom House is located less than 30 miles from the site of a chemical weapon attack in Khan Sheikhoun on April
4 in which least 86 civilians, including dozens of children, were killed. The main hospital for the Maarat al-Numaan District was bombed several days earlier. Victims were treated by clinics in the surrounding area, including the village where the Wisdom House is located.
Numerous domestic and international agencies placed blame for the attack on Assad, but he denied responsibility. Assad has been accused of authorizing numerous chemical attacks during the civil war, including the use of the deadly nerve gas sarin in August 2013 outside of the capital city of Damascus where almost 1,500 people, including 400 children, were killed.
The U.S. responded on April
6 with a singular airstrike of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on the Shayrat airfield, which was allegedly the launching point for the Syrian aircraft that carried out the Idlib attack. The U.S. has pledged no further intervention in the civil war, but plans to instead to continue to focus on defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIS.
Updates about the SETF, The Wisdom House and Letters for Hope are routinely posted on their accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Additional information about the organization and the school are available at http:// thewisdomhouseproject.com and http://syrian-etf.org.