As I speak to you today, WFP (World Food Programme) has zero dollars to provide food to 5 million people inside Syria come Nov. 1.

El Hillo

Categorized in : World

We have seen with our own eyes severely malnourished children. I am sure there also malnourished older people and it is true they are malnourished, and so there is starvation.

There is fairly organized way of registering families and the community itself will play a very important role in making sure that the food gets to the right people.

For people who have been starving, this is going to finish very quickly, so we must be able to continue delivering humanitarian assistance to people in these besieged communities on a continuous basis.

Sieges are a terrible thing and that should not happen and when it happens people suffer and this is what we are seeing now with our own eyes. This is not social media circulating it, we are seeing it.

Unless something big is done to resolve this conflict through political means, the human train that has started moving out of Syria and the neighborhood will continue to be running for many months to come, europe will be faced with a refugee situation similar to the one that led to the creation of UNHCR in 1950.

There are a million people displaced this year and the projection is another million will be displaced inside Syria between now and the end of the year if the violence continues to escalate, so it is safe to assume that more people will be heading to Europe, and rightly so, because the countries that have so generously been hosting these refugees – Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt - are also reaching - in the case of some of them - a breaking point.

I remain very concerned by Aleppo and its surroundings, and Deraa and its surroundings, these are two places in the north and in the south where I fear we will be witnessing more human movements as a result of the intensification of the fighting.

There are 420,000 people in besieged areas in Syria, the biggest portion of them besieged by ISIL in Deir al-Zor, we are ready to talk to anyone to reach civilians and deliver urgently needed humanitarian assistance, but the fact of the matter is we have been extremely unsuccessful in reaching people in areas controlled by ISIL.

We still have the opportunity to invest and help many Syrians stay in Syria. Otherwise this human train will continue running in all directions, including direction Europe.