BEIRUT (AP) — International donors meeting in Brussels said Monday they will release 7.5 billion euros ($8.1 billion) in both grants and loans to support Syrians hit by war, poverty and hunger for the rest this year and beyond.
The pledges exceeded the modest $4.07 billion requested by the United Nations, but were also a significant decline from the amounts pledged last year and earlier – an indication of continued donor fatigue as the world’s attention turns on conflicts elsewhere, including the wars in Ukraine. and Sudan, and most recently Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
At last year’s conference, donors pledged $10.3 billion just months after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and much of northern Syria, killing more than 59,000 people, including 6,000 in Syria.
This year’s amount is aimed at both Syrians in the war-torn country and some 5.7 million Syrian refugees in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, who are facing their own economic crises and frustrated by the increasingly shrinking emerging help.
The committed total for this year includes 5 billion euros in grants – around 3.8 billion euros for 2024 and 1.2 billion euros for the coming year and beyond – and 2.5 billion euros in loans.
UN agencies and international aid groups have struggled with shrinking budgets in recent years, and humanitarian officials have criticized budget cuts that have forced the reduction of aid programs despite skyrocketing poverty.
The civil war in Syria, which broke out in 2011, has killed almost half a million people and displaced half of the pre-war population of 23 million. The conflict has been largely frozen for several years, along with efforts to find a viable political solution to end it. Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have been pushed into poverty and struggle to access food and health care as the economy deteriorates.
The conference brought back the urgency of reviving a stalled U.N.-led roadmap to end the conflict, even as the mood in host countries grows increasingly hostile toward Syrian refugees.
Officials in tiny Lebanon, home to nearly 780,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands more undocumented, are demanding refugees return to so-called “safe zones” in Syria even before there is a political solution to end the war.
Aid agencies and most Western countries believe that such places do not exist and that conditions in Syria are not yet conducive to safe returns.
In Brussels, eight EU member states that have called for a reassessment of conditions in Syria to allow the return of refugees reiterated these calls at the conference. Cyprus, which says it is struggling to deal with rising Syrian migration, was among them, and Hungary echoed similar sentiments.
Aid groups have urged that more sustainable solutions, particularly by boosting early recovery efforts to rebuild infrastructure and help create jobs in Syria, are a crucial prerequisite for people to return.
“The more people will lack essential services, security and basic amenities, the harder it will be to pave the way to stability, reconciliation and return,” said Stephan Sakalian, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Syria, told The Associated Press.
“If we want to ensure the sustainable return of refugees, we must give people the opportunity to return voluntarily, safely and in a sustainable environment,” he added. “Otherwise we run the risk of seeing the opposite trend where people want to return.” keep leaving Syria.”
