Syrian families have been burned in their homes, people bombed waiting for bread, children tortured, raped and murdered and cities reduced to rubble in Syria’s two-year-old war that has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe, the United Nations said on Thursday.
The bleak assessment by top UN humanitarian officials motivated the Security Council, which has been deadlocked over how to deal with the crisis since it began, to reach agreement on a non-binding statement demanding an end to the escalating violence and condemning human rights abuses by all sides.
A quarter of Syria’s 22 million people are displaced within the country and 1.3 million have fled to other states in the Middle East and North Africa, UN aid chief Valerie Amos and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told the UN. Security Council.
It was a rare public briefing of the Security Council on the conflict in Syria, which was called for by Australia, and Amos pleaded for the 15 council members to “take the action necessary to end this brutal conflict.”
“The situation in Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe with ordinary people paying the price for the failure to end the conflict,” Amos said. “I do not have an answer for those Syrians I have spoken to who asked me why the world has abandoned them.”
The Security Council has been deadlocked on how to end the conflict. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s close ally Russia, with the aid of China, has used its veto power to block any condemnations or attempts to sanction Assad’s government.