A total of 21 aid agencies on Thursday slammed the United Nations Security Council over failing to find a solution to the Syrian war, which has left more than 200,000 death. The U.N. resolutions passed last year demanded an end to arbitrary killing and torture, and the removal of barriers to aid access imposed by the Syrian government and insurgents. "There have been more killings, more bombings, a massive increase in displacement and a huge increase in the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance," said Daniel Gorevan, a Syria policy advisor at the British charity Oxfam.
"The Security Council resolutions have essentially failed," he said in an interview in Beirut. Oxfam is one of 21 humanitarian and human rights organizations that wrote the report. Gorevan said Security Council members, which include Russia and the United States, had not implemented their own resolutions by failing to pressure warring parties to stop indiscriminate killing and increase aid access.
In 2014, the United Nations said the Syrian government had approved less than half of its convoys to besieged or "hard-to-reach" areas of Syria. The U.N. is also not working in large areas of Syria run by Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
The report also said humanitarian funding had decreased. In 2013, 71 percent of the funds needed to support civilians inside Syria and refugees in neighboring countries were provided. In 2014, this had declined to 57 percent. A resolution adopted in July authorized the U.N. to undertake cross-border aid operations without consent from Damascus, but the report said these had been hampered by restrictions from neighboring countries, which include Turkey and Jordan. The population has shrunk by 15 percent and life expectancy has dropped 24 years, from an average of 79 to 55, it said. The country's GDP has dropped by nearly $120 billion and four out of every five Syrians live below the national poverty line. Half of all school children have not attended school for the past three years, the report said.
In another report, released by the Syrian Center for Policy Research showed a devastating picture of the "systematic collapse and destruction" of Syria's economic foundations in the report, saying the nation's wealth, infrastructure, institutions and much of its workforce have been "obliterated." Almost three million Syrians lost their jobs during the conflict, which meant that more than 12 million people lost their primary source of income, it said, and unemployment surged from 14.9 percent in 2011 to 57.7 percent at the end of 2014. "As huge swatches of the community have lost the opportunity to work and earn an income, just over 4 in 5 Syrians now live in poverty," the report said. "As it has become a country of poor people, 30 percent of the population have descended into abject poverty where households struggle to meet the basic food needs to sustain bare life." The report said the four-year-old conflict coupled with the country's economic disintegration and social fragmentation have resulted in a 15 percent drop in Syria's population — from 20.87 million in 2010 to just 17.65 million at the end of last year. As violence intensified, it said, the number of deaths in the conflicts rose dramatically to 210,000. Together with the 840,000 wounded this represented 6 percent of Syria's population killed or injured during the conflict, it said. "Equally horrendous is the silent disaster that has reduced life expectancy at birth from 75.9 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.7 years at the end of 2014," it said.
