The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation for the Prevention of Conflicts and Aiding Agricultural Security Problems: Jan Egeland’s humanitarian work in Afghanistan

The four decades of humanitarian work of Jan Egeland has not been the same as before, but he speaks in a calm manner and becomes more animated when discussing a record number of people currently displaced because of humanitarian crises.

We helped over 10 million people last year and need to help even more this year. The enemies are bigger and worse, so we need to be quicker and smarter, responding to crises earlier, providing support for the longer term and helping people to become self-reliant as soon as possible. Money will help us with staff development and we can only do that with our local colleagues. In Afghanistan we have 1,400 humanitarian workers and just 25 of them are international. In general, 99% of our staff are non-Norwegian. This funding will be used to help us concentrate on conflict prevention by helping to resolve conflicts between warring ethnic groups or between farmers and herdsmen competing for land and water resources.

The council was awarded the world’s largest annual Humanitarian award for a nonprofit, which was worth $2.5 million.

The Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian prize is a tribute to extraordinary contributions to alleviate suffering.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/10/20/1129199362/a-2-5-million-prize-gives-this-humanitarian-group-more-power-to-halt-human-suffe

Dialogue on the Crisis and Displacement in the World – A Brief Report on UNICEF Secretary General Egeland Zahra

Prior to becoming secretary general of the council, Egeland worked for Human Rights Watch, Red Cross and the United Nations. Upon returning from a trip to Somalia in June, he spoke with NPR about overlooked crises, equal protection for all refugees and reasons to hope.

Basic items like food, clothing, and medicine are things that organizations on the ground need help with. Zahra says the issue isn’t over with short-term relief efforts, it is about pushing for access to hard-to-reach communities.

We issue an annual report measuring the number of people in greatest need versus the corresponding international media coverage, money directed toward the crises and diplomatic efforts to halt hostilities. Last year the top 10 of the most neglected conflicts and displacement crises in the world were in Africa. More than 25 million people are in need of aid, but it receives little attention. The same is true for many other African countries.

There is global funding going to Ukrainian refugees. The Russian invasion was launched in February. What has changed for Ukrainian refugees?

The situation in conflict-torn Ukranians has gotten worse in the last two years, with trench warfare and the destruction of entire cities. Some areas have become more stable, where we are able to help the internally displaced andUkrainians are returning from abroad after fleeing. At the same time, others continue to be driven out from the south and the east of the country. I’m afraid for the winter. The winterization program is being prepared, so we strengthen the logistic lines from the neighboring states.

It is good to help our neighbor who looks like us and can easily integrate into our society, but we should give protection based on need. In Europe people from the Middle East or Afghanistan are met with a cold shoulder and barbed wire whereas Ukrainians are welcomed. In the US, women and children fleeing horrible violence in their home countries are not always well received. We must stand with those who need protection, and this is a battle of values.

We live and breathe by the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence. We don’t want our colleagues to get close to the government because they are a party to the conflict. We need to have respect and the protection of those parties at the same time. We always try to work on all sides – it pains me that we’re not able to work in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

It is now over a year since the West left Afghanistan, leaving behind 40 million mainly women and children, and they need our solidarity now more than ever. There must be engagement between the de facto authorities and the donor countries on issues such as girls’ education and minority protection. The correct response is to impose sanctions that do not take away food from Taliban soldiers, but make women and children starve.

I’m afraid of that. The first hundred million people displaced by war are the first in recorded history. It was 40 million in 2011. This year has never been as bad for kids going to bed hungry in modern times. We need some countries to recognize that while they are struggling with high energy prices and nationalistic tendencies at home, it is significantly worse in the areas where we operate.

It’s very dramatic. I saw mothers and fathers walking for hundreds of kilometers to seek water and food. We need development, investment, resilience and better use of existing resources. We are part of the Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS), a group of nine national and international NGOs created to balance short-term humanitarian needs with longer-term community preparedness. I witnessed dams being built, and bore holes equipped with solar-powered pumps so people can start to feed themselves independently.

Donate to the international NGOs. Write to politicians to say we want to live by elementary rules of compassion and solidarity. Reach out to those refugees and migrants who come to our communities, befriend them, help them integrate.

It is a time of horrific contrasts. Never have there been so many displaced by violence and conflict, and so many with no chance to feed themselves. Climate change, COVID and conflict have merged to create a lethal cocktail. The good news is that there’s never been more effective humanitarian organizations, better technological advances and more resources. In the past, there have been a lot of billionaires, so there is a chance that we could elevate more people. We could have reached people in great need if we had the resources of those at the top.

I come back an optimist whenever I return from visiting colleagues working in difficult and dangerous circumstances. Over a million children have been helped to go to school and when I speak to them about what they want to be when they are older, they all want to be doctor, engineer, farmer or builder.

The Unprecedented Tribality of the Middle East: A Case Study of the Resilient Response of the Syrian Regime to the July 7 Earthquake

TheSyrian crisis has been forgotten about, according to Alsamman, when talking about the complexity of the Middle East.

The areas of Syria most impacted by the earthquake are held by the regime, others are controlled by Turkish and US-backed opposition forces, and there are Sunni and Kurdish fighters. One of the last opposition strongholds in Syria is held by Hayat Tahrir al- Sham, an armed Sunni Islamist group.

Rescue workers are racing against time to pull survivors from the rubble of destroyed buildings, after a 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on Monday, claiming more than 20,000 lives.

Turkey has offered teams of rescuers, donations and aid to Syria in a matter of hours, as the situation in Syria is vastly different.

The earthquakes have brought new challenges and they are trying to deal with them. Syrians need and deserve more support. Local organizations and the response are deserving of funding.

Most Western countries don’t like the Syrian regime. The leader is forging new relationships with former enemies as he is welcomed back into the fold. Last year, the United Arab Emirates welcomed Assad in Abu Dhabi, and last month Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the pair may soon meet for peace talks.

While Martin Griffiths, the UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, hailed the search and rescue efforts after the earthquake as “unparalleled in history,” in northwest Syria we were left to do what we could with limited existing equipment and manpower. During the most crucial moments of the rescue operations, the United Nations gave no support to the White Helmets, and even now, they have no promise of help to help the recovery and rehabilitation efforts.

That leaves rebel-held areas reliant on aid groups including the UN, who has only been able to send two convoys since Monday, which is starkly different to Turkey, where 70 countries and 14 international organizations have promptly offered teams of rescuers, donations and aid as of Thursday.

The UN hopes to begin moving aid for northern Syria on Thursday. Alloush said he was told to expect six aid trucks by midday.

Activists and observers are concerned that the regime could hamper the aid effort in rebel held areas, most of which are women and children.

“We are exploring all avenues to reach people in need and conducting assessments on feasibility,” Madevi Sun-Suon, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), told CNN on Tuesday. “We do have aid but this road issue is a big challenge as of now.”

The Syrian regime has also used the opportunity to call for sanctions against it to be lifted. Its UN envoy Sabbagh said on Tuesday that planes refused to land at Syrian airports because of American and European sanctions. He said in New York that even those countries who want to send humanitarian assistance can’t because of the sanctions.

In November, a UN-appointed human rights expert called for the immediate lifting of unilateral sanctions against Syria, saying they are exacerbating the destruction and trauma suffered by ordinary citizens there.

“It would be quite ironic, if not even counterproductive, for us to reach out to a government that has brutalized its people over the course of a dozen years now – gassing them, slaughtering them, being responsible for much of the suffering that they have endured,” US State Department spokesperson Ned Price told a media briefing on Monday.

“It’s a very convenient time for the regime to be making that argument because if sanctions were dropped, the ramifications of the much broader geopolitical situation would be game changing,” said Lister.

Why it matters: Turkey, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia are considering a joint next-to-Leading-Order, after a three-year Arab boycott

Why it matters: The announcement comes less than 10 days after a drone attack on a military plant in Iran’s central city of Isfahan that US media outlets attributed to Israel . IRNA said the new underground base was one of the country’s most important air force bases, built deep underground, housing fighters equipped with long-range cruise missiles.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Tuesday he was ready to restart stalled negotiations over Sweden’s application to join NATO as soon as Turkey was, Reuters reported.

After Russia invaded the Ukrainians, many NATO member states decided to join, and Turkey has yet to give its approval in what must be unanimous. Turkey last week said it looks positively on Finland’s application, but does not support Sweden’s, even though the two Nordic neighbors are seeking to join at the same time.

Ankara suspended talks last month as tensions rose, despite the fact that the three nations had an agreement on a way forward last year. Turkey will hold elections in May.

The move comes amidst an apparent thaw in relations. Bahrain’s crown prince spoke with Qatar’s emir in a phone call last month, in a sign the two Gulf states could move towards repairing relations two years after the Arab boycott was lifted. The conversation came after the Qatari emir and Bahrain’s king attended a small Arab summit hosted by the UAE’s president in Abu Dhabi.

In January 2021, six countries ended a three-year political and economic boycott of the Persian Gulf state ofQatar. But since then there have been no bilateral discussions between Doha and Manama to resolve remaining differences. All but Bahrain restored travel and trade links in 2021.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/middleeast/syria-left-behind-earthquake-mime-intl/index.html

Doctors without Borders: The suspension of AlMosahf’s Twitter account after the September 11 earthquake destroyed the border of Idlib

The account AlMosahf had over 12 million followers by the time it was taken down.

There is a user who believes that Musk did not violate the rules because his followers are quoted from the Holy Quran. We demand the lifting of the suspension of this account.”

Not all users were upset with the suspension. The account use of incomplete Quranic verse that they said is taken out of context changed the meaning of the text.

The account owner appears to run sister accounts in English, French and German, on which it posts translations of Quranic verses. The account that shows Quranic videos has been campaigning to have the original account unblocked.

According to Doctors without Borders, access to the area was limited by the cross-border mechanism that was agreed on by the UN Security Council.

The conditions for the more than 10 million people in Syria who have been impacted by the disaster are being further affected by snow, which is making the situation worse.

The administration that controls the only access point between the two countries had said that there were only 300 bodies left in the three-day period.

The UN had said that roads to the crossing were blocked but as of Wednesday the roads were clear, which raised questions about why it took so long for help to arrive.

Efforts to aid the people in the devastated areas of Syria have been difficult because of the destruction of the border, a top aid official has told CNN.

Abu Muhammad Sakhour, a former merchant, is volunteering as a nurse in the rebel-held city of Idlib, dressing wounds for quake victims and checking up on the injured who have been discharged from crowded hospitals.

The Emergency Response of the UN to the Syrian Episodic Ebolbolev Convulsion: Implications for the UN and Security Council

At the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, protesters hold signs asking why only bodies are being allowed through. The bodies belong to Syrian refugees who sought safety in Turkey and are now being sent back to be buried on home soil.

Muhammad Munther Atqi, who works in the Independent Doctor’s Association, lives out of his car with his family in Gaziantep Turkey, but is in close contact with his colleagues in Syria. He said hospitals there have been overwhelmed with bodies, and staff are waiting for families to come and identify them, so they can be taken away.

Time and again Russia has used its veto at the Security Council to shut border crossings, reducing the routes for delivery of cross-border aid via Turkey to a single entry. Opening additional crossings on a temporary basis is not enough — more cross-border routes were already sorely needed.

“We don’t need the politics. We don’t need the game playing that’s going on. The international community needs to focus on the border crossing staying open. “Because now, we are past the first phase of finding people, and we are heading into the humanitarian phase. We need to provide people with basic shelter, food, and water.”

The number of people who were in need of humanitarian assistance before the earthquake stood at 15.3 million – but that number will now have to be revised, UN Resident Coordinator for Syria, El-Mostafa Benlamlih said.

An aid worker told CNN that homeless people are sleeping in their cars in northern Syria as a result of a very difficult situation.

Those that are alive under rubble might die in the cold weather, according to the Country Director of MedGlobal.

“He is using the disaster as a ticket to remove sanctions,” said Omar Abu Layla, executive director of Deir Ezzor 24, a research organization that delivers news from Syria’s Deir al-Zour province. “If we want to bring aid to Syria, we can. Time is crucial. We are playing with life and death.”

The UN’s failure to respond quickly to this catastrophe is shameful. When I asked the UN why help hadn’t arrived in time, the answer I got was bureaucracy. In the face of one of the deadliest catastrophes to strike the world in years, it seems the UN’s hands were tied by red tape.

Syrian people don’t know where to get their next meal. It is not about meat or vegetables when we say meal. it’s about simple bread,” said Moutaz Adham, Oxfam’s country director for Syria.

A week since the earthquake, voice messages from people sharing traumatizing stories from the ground have not stopped flooding the phone of Al-Dahhan.

A day before, another video went viral showing volunteer rescuers in a different part of the rebel-held territory saving a family from under the rubble, 40 hours after the earthquake.

Many of the 4.6 million residents had fled here from other parts of the country, searching for safety from the barrel bombs and airstrikes of the Syrian regime and its ally, Russia.

The Syrian earthquake is still going strong: Assad’s message to the world is not going to stop talking about the situation in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake

Humanitarian aid and international aid haven’t appeared 72 hours after the catastrophic earthquake, he said.

The rescue efforts are carried out by poorly equipped civil defense groups. Everyone is waiting for international rescue and aid to help them with the aftermath of the disaster.

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the situation in north-west Syria is still very bad, with only around 5% of reported sites covered by search and rescue.

People are digging with their own hands in many areas, but the situation is particularly dire in northwestern Syria, where there is little heavy machinery to lift rubble. There have been shortages of fuel in hospitals.

The scale of the challenge is heightened by the fact that areas in Turkey and Syria are facing colder than normal temperatures. For example, the Syrian city of Aleppo is forecast to have lows of -3°C to -2°C (27°F to 28°F) through this weekend, whereas February low are normally 2.5°C (36°F).

Standing near a building destroyed by the earthquake, Assad told reporters that Western countries “have no regard for the human condition.” The comments are in line with statements made by government officials and the state-run media of Syria, which have blamed the lack of humanitarian aid on US and EU sanctions.

Assad and his wife, Asma, were seen visiting different areas affected by the earthquake, according to SANA.

The collapse of Juma’s home in the outskirts of Jinderis, Syria, reveals the frustrations of his family and friends

The US Treasury issued a “General License” for 180 days on Friday, allowing all earthquake relief-related transactions that were otherwise prohibited by sanctions to be done. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said the measure was meant to give false impressions of humanity.

JINDERIS, Syria — Mohammed Juma sleeps on the heap of rubble that crushed his family as he survived. In the freezing nights, the 20-year-old and others in this town — still dazed and in shock — burn possessions found in the debris for heat.

By contrast, across the border in the northwest of Syria, residents of the town of Jinderis heard the screams of those trapped under the rubble but, without the right machinery and equipment, were powerless to save them.

On a rare visit to this rebel-held enclave, NPR saw no international crews of rescuers, no trucks loaded with machinery or medical aid and no streams of ambulances to save the wounded. The border crossing into Syria was empty.

Mohammed Juma said his wife and children were alive after the home collapsed on top of them. Juma and his neighbors pulled at the shattered concrete for hours until their hands bled, but the effort was futile.

Now the Syrian civil defense teams are using the few excavators they do have to recover the dead. At least 850 bodies had been pulled from the rubble on Friday. Zakaria Tabakh, 26, remembers cuddling his son, 2-year-old Abdulhadi, to sleep and laying him in his bed, where he was killed by the falling debris. Tabakh’s wife died in the bed beside him. He said that few friends were able to attend the funeral because they were too busy with their own burials.

After years of war, they’ve been left with nothing. Tens of thousands now live with almost no access to basic services in makeshift tents set up in the olive groves where the mud clogs and weighs down the legs of children playing outside.

Less than one hour’s drive from the open border, the town of Sawran no longer has running water. The destroyed home of the Turki family is on the other side of the street. Across the road a family of seven were killed. Neighbors said they had moved to Sawran after fleeing their home in Khan Sheikhoun, where in 2017 the Syrian government attacked the population with the nerve agent Sarin, killing 89 people.

He says that the voice messages he has received chronicle their pain and make it impossible to sleep. Haunted by their cries, he lies awake tormented by guilt. He worries that each moment he rests, thousands back home in Syria are still buried alive under rubble.

“It’s destroying me,” Al-Dahhan, 31, told CNN. I was receiving many calls and messages from other people who said they were seeing other people die around me. I can’t stop hearing them.”

As Al-Dahhan travels to raise funds in person, Alsamman is using social media to raise money and deliver food boxes to those affected.

Meanwhile, on the ground, his colleagues who survived have been in a race against time, using the funds raised by workers like Al-Dahhan to help rescue those still trapped under the rubble and deliver relief to shell-shocked survivors.

Since the earthquake, Al-Dahhan says he has not properly eaten and can’t sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time, the exhaustion evident in his voice.

“At least I get a little bit of relief, knowing what I’m doing matters, because the more I can fundraise here, the more it helps out there,” he said. “But I am in constant stress that I’m not doing enough and I need to keep going. When I sleep, I feel guilty. I need to be awake every second. I need to be working. I want to get more updates. I feel like I am operating here, but my mind and soul are not.

An Israeli Airstrike to Save Two Syrians: a Loss of Two Sisters and the Enduring Journey to Eleven-Midnight in Syria

Another story is about a family that lost two sisters in the earthquake, leaving their children orphaned. Their brother died after learning of his sisters deaths, leaving his children without a father, says Al-Dahhan.

“My mind started racing and I immediately thought it was an Israeli airstrike, since we have had a few of those in Latakia over the past few years,” Alsamman, 27, told CNN. “When I saw the reports of a massive earthquake in the middle of the night, I began to wish it had only been an airstrike.”

He spent the next hours in agony, he said, watching images of death and devastation pour into his phone with no way of knowing if his friends or family were trapped under the rubble.

“It felt like no one was there for them, no aid was coming through, the only organizations able to provide aid were the ones already there,” Al-Dahhan said.

When the opportunity to rescue survivors waned, Syrians in the US rushed to raise as much money as they could for the organizations on the ground.

Nour Al Ghraowi, who immigrated to New York City from Damascus, Syria, following the civil war in Syria that started in 2011, is also helping through her work as a communications coordinator with Karam Foundation.

“Even though on a bigger scale it seems that the world has been quiet and no one has been talking about them, there are organizations and people who are still fighting for them, who never stopped for one moment fighting for them,” Al Ghraowi said.

Most of the casualties were in the northwest area of the country, predominantly in Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartus, a region already struggling to rebuild vital infrastructure heavily damaged by aerial bombardment during the country’s civil war, which the UN estimates to have claimed 300,000 lives since 2011.

Zahra emphasized the urgency of donations to provide immediate needs, including food, shelter, non-food items, and medicine, but said providing Syrians with mental-health care is also critical.

One of the biggest issues contributing to these mental health issues experienced by Syrians in the country and in the US, she says, is the feeling of being abandoned and forgotten.

“It’s only natural to have that reinforcement of asking themselves, ‘Do I matter as much or will I be forgotten again?’” she added. Will I be another undignified picture that is circulated but not humanized?

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/us/syrian-american-earthquake-raise-money-rescue-relief/index.html

Damned by the Syrian earthquake, the Red Crescent Society of Palestine says. “People’s bodies are still going through the rubble,” a Palestinian woman says

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said it was the first group to send a team to help earthquake victims in Syria. Some children and their families are suffering from severe trauma caused by the earthquake in order to receive mental health services from a team of Palestinians and local volunteers.

Photographs and videos of the destruction caused by the earthquake and the aftermath of the war have made Al-Dahhan feel a certain type of psychological trauma.

The war that happened really messed me up, and so I built walls. I didn’t want to get hurt like that again,” Al-Dahhan said. I feel the walls crumbling from this earthquake. I can not think of anything else, as I remember things that I don’t want to remember.

Others, like Zahra and Alsamman say they are struggling with survivor’s guilt because they think it won’t be enough.

“Don’t move on and forget about us,” he begged. “In three weeks, when it isn’t as trendy to post and talk about Syria, know that the people of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and Hama don’t have the option of moving on.”

We don’t have time to heal those wounds, so we are shouting from the rooftops, please don’t get distracted, please donate, please help.”

Every hour brings more news of death, children orphaned, entire families still buried under the rubble, as survivors remain in the streets holding onto diminishing glimmers of hope.

The workers searched for victims in the rubble, but their hopes of finding anyone else were lost after the building fell. The niece and nephew of Ms. Omac’s husband were under the debris. She was waiting for the rescuers to pull their relatives out, alive or dead.

A huge quantity of tents has been distributed by Turkey’s national emergency management agency, but the scale of the disaster has left many without shelter.

One family, numbering about a dozen, built a shelter of cardboard and tarp over a flatbed truck with blankets and thin mattresses in the beds, after many people cobbled together what they could.

The Turkish Red Crescent said it was putting up more tents after Turkish media reported a lack of temporary housing and unsanitary conditions for homeless people.

Thousands of people have been saved from the rubble by a UN-based humanitarian mission in Syria: Report of the Kahramanmaras disaster

Martin Griffiths, the top humanitarian chief at the United Nations, said on Monday that the window for rescuing people from the rubble was “coming to a close,” and that the focus was moving to providing homes, food, schooling and psychological care to victims.

Editor’s Note: Raed Al Saleh is head of The White Helmets, a group of nearly 3,000 volunteers working to save lives and strengthen communities in Syria. The views expressed in this commentary are of his own. You can read the opinion on CNN.

Our team of White Helmets volunteer rescue workers in northwest Syria have been working around the clock night and day, pulling survivors from the rubble and searching for signs of life — with virtually no help from the outside world.

We have the equipment and training to deal with heavy search and rescue. The volunteers have been doing the impossible, and I am humbled by their selflessness and dedication.

The UN was asking the Security Council to authorize aid access through two more border crossings, a misguided approach that wasted precious time. Legal analysts and scholars have argued against it, and humanitarian organizations say the need is too high for aid entry to be politicized.

It is necessary that the United Nations do better. If the system that was designed to save human lives in an emergency has left children to die under the rubble, it’s clear that something is broken.

Local affected communities that lent their vehicles and fuel to help dig, and donate fuel to save themselves from the cold, were the ones who helped the most.

Rescue teams in southern Turkey say they are still hearing voices from under the rubble more than a week after a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake, offering a glimmer of hope of finding more survivors.

Live images broadcast on CNN affiliate CNN Turk showed rescuers working in two areas of the Kahramanmaras region, where they were trying to save three sisters believed to be buried under the debris.

On Tuesday, rescuers pulled an 18-year-old boy and a man alive from the rubble, a day after they saved a 10-year-old girl.

More than 36,000 people have been confirmed dead and survival stories are becoming less and less common eight days later.

Syria Civil Defense declared a seven-day mourning period and has offered help since the end of its search-and-rescue operation last week

After announcing an end to their search and rescue operation last week, the “White Helmets” group, officially known as Syria Civil Defense, on Monday declared a seven-day mourning period in rebel-controlled areas in the north of the country.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay on Tuesday denied reports of food and aid shortages. He said there was no problem with feeding the public and millions of blankets were being sent to all areas.

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said more than 9,200 foreign personnel are taking part in the country’s search and rescue operations, while 100 countries have offered help so far.