UN reveals horror of Syrian town’s siege

BEIRUT: Siege and starvation have left the rebel-held Syrian town of Madaya in a nightmarish state not seen elsewhere in the country, a UN official who traveled there said Tuesday, as some 300 residents fled and desperately needed humanitarian aid arrived.

The former mountain resort, besieged since last summer by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, came to international attention in recent weeks as reports of starvation emerged and activists shared images of emaciated children and old men widely on social media.
Sajjad Malik, the UN refugee agency’s chief in Damascus, told journalists that the “very grim” picture was the result of a blockade of food, medicine and other supplies that left the town in a “desperate situation.”
“There is no comparison to what we saw in Madaya,” he said from Damascus by telephone to Geneva. “It is a place where you could see there are people, but there is no life... What we saw is something that was pretty horrible.”
Malik described seeing shivering, malnourished children and young adults, saying “most of them had not had bread or rice or vegetables or fruit for months.” He said a kg of rice would sell there for $300, and noted one account of one person selling a motorcycle to buy 5 kilos of rice.
A day earlier, the UN said that about 400 people in the town’s hospital needed to be evacuated immediately for medical treatment as starvation and other factors had left them on the brink of death. Syrian authorities, rebels and aid groups have yet to respond. The UN goal was to obtain safe passage to evacuate the 400 later on Tuesday.
UN officials said it was too early to determine whether anyone had died of hunger. But the aid group Doctors Without Borders has said that 23 people died of starvation at a health center it supports in Madaya since Dec. 1, including six infants and five adults over 60.
Various UN officials have described how locals had been forced to forage for food, such as risking walks in minefields to collect grass or cooking up “leaf soup,” and were burning cardboard to stay warm in their homes.
Madaya is not the only place in Syria suffering from siege, an age-old tactic of war that belligerents continue to use despite international laws banning it. The UN says some 15 municipalities across Syria are currently blockaded, with no one able to get in or out.
Two Shiite villages in the north, under siege by rebels, face similar circumstances, with food and medicine scarce. Residents are said to be eating grass to survive and undergoing surgery without anesthesia. Another tiny improvement in Madaya came with the evacuation of some 300 civilians, mostly women and children, who left the town near the Lebanese border on foot and were then transported to government-run temporary shelters.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the civilians had separately arranged with government forces to leave the city, with some heading to shelters set up in schools and similar places in the area and nearby capital, Damascus.