ROME: The United Nations will resume food aid to Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries, following a campaign to raise funds for a halted programme offering food vouchers, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced yesterday.
About 1.7 million refugees in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt will have their electronic food vouchers topped up by mid-December, so they can purchase food in local shops.
The announcement came after a campaign by the WFP seeking funds to cover a $64m shortfall which had forced the agency to suspend the programme at the beginning of December.
“There was jubilation among the refugees after the announcement,” WFP spokeswoman Abeer Etefa said.
Syrians facing the winter cold will again be able to feed their families, she said, although there is concern among the refugees about what will happen at the end of January, when the current funding dries up.
The WFP has raised $80m from private individuals, countries and companies thanks to a social media campaign.
“This outpouring of support in such a short time is unprecedented,” WFP executive director Ertharin Cousin said in a statement.
“We’re especially grateful to the many individual members of the public who reached into their own pockets to send whatever they could to help Syrian refugees who have lost everything.”
More than 4 million people internally displaced inside Syria are receiving food packages, including cooking oil, lentils and rice, Etefa said. Refugees in neighbouring states are given electronic vouchers.
“The Syria emergency has been the largest use of this voucher programme ever,” Etefa said.
REUTERS
BEIRUT: The UN envoy to Syria held “constructive” talks with rebel groups on a plan to suspend fighting in the country’s second city of Aleppo, his spokeswoman said yesterday.
A day after Staffan de Mistura’s meetings in Gaziantep, Turkey, one rebel chief said he was awaiting a “written proposal from the UN, with all the details, before announcing a decision”.
De Mistura’s spokeswoman, Juliette Touma, said the envoy had found his six meetings “with representatives of the most important armed and unarmed groups from Aleppo to be constructive”.
De Mistura announced his plan for a “freeze” in fighting in late October, following a series of failed international efforts to negotiate an end to Syria’s conflict which erupted in March 2011.
He has since said Aleppo is a “good candidate” for the bid.
Aleppo has been divided between regime control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.
De Mistura’s initiative does not include “all the required mechanisms and guarantees”, said Qais Sheikh, head of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), a coalition of several dozen moderate and Islamist opposition groups.
The envoy “has built his plan on a series of convictions that are different from ours,” said Sheikh, one of the leaders who met with de Mistura.
“So we asked him for a written plan that includes all the details so that we can discuss it in the RCC and with our allies in the opposition,” he said.
The Syrian government, for its part, has responded with “constructive interest” to the Aleppo plan, de Mistura said last month after talks in Damascus with President Bashar Al Assad.
AFP
