The United Nations' independent international investigative commission for Syria announced today that since October, the violence in that country has been on the rise, the worst since 2020 in the civil war that began 14 years ago today.
For years, the civil war has been largely frozen in Syria, which is effectively divided between areas controlled by the official government of President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and various opposition armed groups and Syrian Kurdish forces.
The latest spike in violence began in October when a drone attack on the Military Academy in the city of Homs killed dozens of people.
The UN commission's report said Syrian forces, along with their Russian allies, then bombarded rebel-held northwestern Syria, hitting "several hospitals, schools, markets and camps for internally displaced persons."
In recent weeks, opposition-held areas have been in turmoil, with protests erupting in Idlib against the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, which governs the area.
The Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator of the United Nations for the crisis in Syria, David Carden, said during a recent visit to the northwest of the country that the UN humanitarian plan for 2023, which requested more than five billion dollars, received only 38 percent of the requested funds, which is the lowest since the beginning of the crisis.
"There are 4,2 million people in northwest Syria who need urgent humanitarian aid, including two million children, of whom even one million do not go to school," he added.
UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations are struggling to secure much-needed funding for aid programs in Syria, blaming the shortage on "donor fatigue", the Covid-19 pandemic and conflicts elsewhere in recent years.
The UN World Food Program ("WFP"), which estimates that more than 12 million Syrians are irregularly fed, announced in December that it would suspend its main aid program.
The war, which has killed more than half a million people and displaced almost half of the pre-war population of 23 million, began in March 2011 as a peaceful protest against the government of Bashar al-Assad. However, the authorities violently suppressed those protests and the rebellion quickly turned into a civil war.
Russia, together with Iran, became Assad's biggest ally in the war, Turkey supported various rebel groups, the US supported the forces of the Syrian Kurds in the fight against the extremist organization Islamic State (IS), and Israel attacked the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah from the air in Syria and forces of Iran.
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