The German government is actively engaged in a wide spectrum of efforts to help alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people, including measures in the fields of food security, infrastructure rehabilitation and drinking water supplies. Germany is working with a large number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as with the United Nations. Humanitarian access to Aleppo is urgently needed.
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The German government is actively engaged in efforts to mitigate the suffering of the Syrian people. It is cooperating with the United Nations and numerous NGOs. Currently, humanitarian aid still has no access to the parts of Aleppo worst hit by the war. While the UN stores in western Aleppo are well stocked, the United Nations has no way of getting relief though to people in the parts of eastern Aleppo that have been the scene of the heaviest fighting.
Germany works only with the United Nations and with non-governmental organisations. Some 50,000 people, many of them children, are thought to be fighting for survival there without adequate food, drinking water or heating.
Some German NGOs are working in Aleppo province. The German Red Cross, for instance, is endeavouring to ensure food security. Germany has provided three million euros for measures in the city of Aleppo alone – to be used in part to rebuild the public water supply system.
In the area surrounding Aleppo humanitarian aid projects are being supported to the tune of more than 16.6 million euros. The projects include measures implemented by Save the Children, the Malteser, Doctors of the World, Welthungerhilfe and the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF). They focus on water supply systems, supplying drinking water with water tankers, rehabilitating infrastructure and restoring water pumps.
Germany is supporting mobile hospitals and blood banks in Aleppo province through the Malteser (1.48 million euros provided in 2016). These hospitals are operating in the north of Aleppo Province close to the Turkish border.
In the city of Aleppo itself, another eight mobile hospitals are operated by various UN special agencies (World Health Organization, United Nations International Children’s Fund, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, United Nations Population Fund). They are providing medical care for the new waves of Syrians that have been forced to flee their homes.
At the Supporting Syria and the Region conference held in London in February 2016, Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged aid totalling 1.2 billion euros for 2016. This aid has helped in particular boost the food rations provided by the World Food Programme to 100 per cent, and has made it possible to maintain this level all year.
More funding has been channelled into education for refugee children, the construction of schools in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and into employment (cash-for-work measures). UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has received 32 million euros, enabling it to provide tents and containers as well as other relief supplies including mattresses, rugs, hygiene packs and winter relief. The International Committee of the Red Cross was accorded eight million euros to help finance health care and water supplies. The German government will provide assistance on a similar scale for these purposes in the year to come.
When he visited Lebanon in early December, Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier pledged an additional sum of 50 million euros in humanitarian aid. The funding is to be used, for instance, to care for the civilians who have fled their homes in and around Aleppo.
The relief measures are to be implemented by non-governmental organisations already working on the ground in Aleppo, as well as by the World Food Programme, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Germany is also providing emergency funding of 5 million euros for the UN Humanitarian Pooled Fund in Gaziantep. This fund finances cross-border measures from Turkey to northern Syria. Syrian NGOs generally implement measures, but the United Nations is also involved.