RIYADH (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th March, 2020) The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) urgently needs $19 million to provide more assistance in northwest Syria, UNICEF middle East and North Africa Regional Chief of Communications, Juliette Touma, told Sputnik.
"We are in need right now urgently as we speak. We are in need of $19 million at UNICEF... to buy more assistance and do the necessary so we can deliver the assistance to the northwest," Touma said on the sidelines of the 2nd Riyadh International Humanitarian Forum.
Touma said this amount of money is required only for the northwest.
"We have overall inside Syria huge, huge humanitarian operations that we have been running for almost nine years. And it is in response to the huge volume of humanitarian needs among children in the country," she said.
Syria, she noted, has five million kids in need of assistance overall.
On February 17, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock stated that roughly 900,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in northwest Syria since the start of December.
Syrian government forces have launched an offensive in the Idlib province to recapture pockets of the region controlled by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist organization (formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, banned in Russia). Violence in the region has increased amid tit-for-tat strikes between government troops and Turkish units that maintain observation posts in northwest Syria.
