Displaced people, local organizations, and humanitarian workers attributed the water shortage crisis in the camps, coupled with the accumulation of waste and the lack of sewage treatment, to “the fact that several organizations have stopped providing their services due to the decline in donor funding.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told Agence France-Presse that “4.1 million people in northwestern Syria, representing 80 percent of the population, need support in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector during the current year, but this sector is the least funded.”
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “41 per cent of camps, or 460 out of 1,100 camps, lack basic water, sanitation and hygiene support from humanitarian partners.”
The UN expects “111 more camps to be cut off from services by the end of September, highlighting the urgent need for increased financial support to maintain essential humanitarian operations in the region.”
In the first quarter of 2024, “only two percent of the funding required for the response in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector was received,” according to the same source.
For years, residents of the overcrowded camps have relied on food, medical and logistical aid provided by local and international organizations, amid dire poverty.
“The conditions in the camps in northwest Syria are deplorable,” David Carden, deputy regional coordinator for the Syria crisis, told AFP. “Seventy percent of them are overcrowded, families in dilapidated tents face stifling heat, while garbage piles up in camps with no sanitation support and children get sick.”
The areas “outside the control of the Syrian government in Idlib and its surroundings are home to more than five million people, the majority of whom are displaced,” according to the United Nations.
“They previously deprived us of relief baskets and bread, and now they are depriving us of water, as if they are trying to kill us slowly,” Hussein al-Naasan, a 30-year-old displaced person who lives with his wife and two children in a camp in the city of Sarmada, north of Idlib province, near the Turkish border, told Agence France-Presse.
“For us, water is life, it is everything,” explained Al-Nasan, who has been displaced for 11 years.
Under the scorching sun, the man recounts how he shares a water tank with three other families, sharing the benefit and the price of the water, which is urgently needed during the summer with the high temperatures inside the tents that are widely spread in the area.
He added: “We face great difficulty in obtaining water, which we cannot afford to buy on a regular basis due to the lack of aid and job opportunities.”
He expressed his fear that “the water cut-off and the cessation of garbage collection will lead to the spread of germs and diseases and then the collapse of the health system, which is already exhausted following more than 13 years of devastating conflict,” describing it as a “major disaster.”
During a field visit to a camp on the outskirts of the city of Sarmada, north of Idlib Governorate, Fidaa Al-Hamid, a doctor with the local “Al-Ataa” association, who is responsible for a mobile clinic, noted that “the rate of scabies infection in some camps exceeds ninety percent.”
He said this was due to “water shortages, garbage in the streets and the lack of sewage networks.”
In a camp near the village of Bardaqli in the northern Idlib countryside, Asmaa Al-Saleh (32 years old) feels that her hands are tied due to the difficulty of providing the water she needs to prepare food and bathe her five children.
“I don’t have a water tank and I can’t afford to buy one,” she says, adding, “When I run out of water, I walk carrying empty containers to fill them from nearby wells.”
Source: AFP
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2024-07-12 06:21:50