Press Statement

Hadi al-Bahra

President of the Syrian Coalition

December 01, 2014

We are extremely concerned by the UN World Food Program (WFP) announcement that it is suspending food assistance to 1.7 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries due to shortages of funds. Those vulnerable refugees desperately rely on this help, especially as they face a harsh winter. With refugees recently freezing to death in Lebanon, the catastrophic consequences of winter have already begun to cause immense suffering.

The suspension of UN vouchers will cause thousands of families to starve to death and will put much more pressure on already strained hosting countries, struggling to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.

The international community has a moral obligation to prevent the looming starvation of hundreds of thousands refugees by providing the necessary funds to keep the UN WFP assistance program running. It is completely unacceptable that refugees, who have fled violence and death in Syria, are left alone to bear unimaginable suffering and fight for survival in such extremely harsh circumstances.