UN says 1m Syrians in need of food aid

About one million Syrians are going short of food, most of them in conflict zones, due to government restrictions on aid distribution, the UN said.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) is handing out rations to about 1.5 million people in Syria each month, still short of the 2.5 million deemed to be in need, WFP spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said.

Bread and fuel are particularly in short supply.

The WFP is unable to step up assistance as only a handful of aid agencies are authorised to distribute relief goods in Syria, where more than 60,000 people have been killed during 21 months of conflict.

“Our main partner, the (Syrian Arab) Red Crescent, is overstretched and has no more capacity to expand further,” Ms Byrs told a news briefing in Geneva.

Long lines in front of bakeries are normal in many parts of Syria and there are reports of shortages of wheat flour in most parts of the country due to damage to mills, most of which are located in the embattled Aleppo area, she said.

“WFP is making arrangements to import fuel for humanitarian use, to resolve the impact of a significant fuel shortage throughout the country that has been affecting the agency’s ability to move food on time — from the port to packaging facilities — and to find trucks to dispatch food for distribution,” she said.

The UN last month appealed for $1.5bn to help save the millions of Syrians.

Four million people in the country need urgent humanitarian aid, including an estimated 2 million displaced from their homes by fighting between the forces of president Bashar al-Assad and rebels trying to topple him. The number of registered Syrian refugees has leapt from 500,000 to nearly 600,000 in the past month, UN figures show.

Lebanon’s Druze leader Walid Jumblatt claimed world powers are abandoning Syria to be “systematically destroyed” by a civil war that has already wrecked whole cities in a once-great Arab nation.

Accusing them of “indifference or conspiracy”, Jumblatt said none of the international players, which are deeply divided over the uprising against Assad, had shown any urgency to stem the bloodshed.

Jumblatt has called for foreign states to do more to help rebels defeat Assad swiftly and avoid the partition of Syria, home to majority Sunni Muslims as well as minorities including Assad’s Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Shi’ites and Druze.

“It is obvious that because of a conflict of interests between big powers, Syria is being left to be systematically destroyed,” he said at his Ottoman-era mansion in Mukhtara, in the mountains south of Beirut.

“The more time passes, the more the civil war will be increasingly violent and the Syrian people will suffer more casualties and more suffering.”

Jumblatt, 63, who has led Lebanon’s most prominent Druze family since his father’s assassination in 1977, was once an ally of Assad and his late father but has changed allegiances several times to maximise his small Druze minority’s influence in Lebanese politics.