Post date: Apr 18, 2013 9:15:40 PM
6.8 million Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance, says the United Nations.Syria blames foreign terrorists for bloodshed.
UNITED NATIONS (APRIL 18, 2013) (UNTV) - Syrian families have been burned in their homes, people bombed waiting for bread, children tortured, raped and murdered and cities reduced to rubble inSyria's two-year-old war that has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe, the United Nations said on Thursday (April 18).
A quarter of Syria's 22 million people are displaced within the country and 1.3 million have fled to other states in the Middle East and North Africa, U.N. aid chiefValerie Amos and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told the U.N. Security Council.It was a rare public briefing of the Security Council on the conflict in Syria, which was called for by Australia, and Amos pleaded for the 15 council members to "take the action necessary to end this brutal conflict."
"The situation in Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe with ordinary people paying the price for the failure to end the conflict," Amos said.
The Security Council has been deadlocked on how to end the conflict. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's close ally Russia, with the aid of China, has used its veto power to block any condemnations or attempts to sanction Assad's government.
Guterres, who spoke to the Security Council via videolink, said that since February, there have been 8,000 Syrians a day fleeing across the country's borders and at that rate the number of refugees was forecast to more than double by the end of the year to 3.5 million.
"This is not just frightening, it risks becoming simply unsustainable. There is no way to adequately respond to the enormous humanitarian needs these figures represent," he told the Security Council. "And it is difficult to imagine how a nation can endure so much suffering."
He warned of the conflict spilling over into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq -Syria's neighbors bearing the refugee burden. He said that taking into account only registered refugees, Lebanon's population had grown by 10 percent.
Amos said there were 6.8 million people inside Syria in need of aid.
The United Nations says the war in Syria, which began as peaceful protests that turned violent when Assad tried to crush the revolt, has claimed more than 70,000 lives.
Syria's U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari blamed terrorism and sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States and others for the plight of its people and accused neighboring countries of preventing refugees from returning to Syria.
"Syrian people will not forgive facilitating the movement of thousands of European and Western terrorists and jihadists, sponsored by well-known intelligence agencies ... to the Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders with Syria," he said.
"They are accommodated in training camps to then enter my country and spread destruction and sabotage, and shed innocent blood," Ja'afari told the Security Council in comments that echoed what Assad said in a television interview on Wednesday.