Sanaa Al-Ali – Deir Ezzor
I sat next to Reem and looked into her eyes. She is two and a half years old. In other places around the world, children play safely and receive sufficient care. However, Reem, as obvious on her face, has experienced, hunger, illness, and wasting. Her mother said, “Some organizations visit us, but we don’t benefit from them at all”.
The decline of funds forces the World Food Program to reduce food and cash assistance to nearly half of the 5.5 million beneficiaries it supports in Syria, starting from the beginning of July 2023. This action will have a severe impact on nearly 2.5 million people who rely on the already half-sized ration, barely enough for their survival.
This decision did not consider little Reem, her mother, or the millions of children at risk in the country. Syria ranks sixth in terms of the number of people suffering from food insecurity in the world. WFP estimates that more than half of the population in Syria is in the grip of hunger. Nearly three million more people are at risk of food insecurity.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a statement last year that it is extremely dangerous to leave millions of children in Syria at increased risk of malnutrition. According to the statement, “an estimated more than 600,000 children under the age of five are stunted, the result of chronic undernutrition, leaving them at risk of irreversible physical and psychological damage”.
The most prominent and life-threatening form of malnutrition is wasting, which results from the failure to prevent malnutrition among the most vulnerable children.
Wasted children are severely underweight, and their immune systems are weak, making them susceptible to growth delay, diseases, and death. Some wasted children also suffer from nutritional edema, which can be observed through swelling of the face, feet, and limbs.
According to the UNICEF, only one in three children with severe wasting around the world has been reached and provided with the timely treatment to recover and live a healthy life.
Reem, the little child, lives with her mother in her grandfather’s house in the countryside of Deir Ezzor. Poverty is clearly visible in the house. I sat near Reem’s mother and asked her what had happened. Sadly, the mother said: “Reem started vomiting and lost her appetite to eat. She also suffered from diarrhea”. One of her neighbors told her about a medical organization in the village that can help. Reem’s mother quickly carried her little daughter and went to the organizaiton. The nurse told her that Reem was suffering from severe malnutrition.
“I was very scared. I almost fell down, but the nurse helped me and gave me a glass of water”. Reem’s mother is in a real difficult situation, she told us: “I had no money to go to the doctor. My husband is a soldier with the SDF. He goes away for a whole week to work”. Reem’s mother asked for money from a relative and managed to go to the hospital. The doctor prescribed her medicine and certain types of food, but the mother could not afford the doctor’s instructions. As a result, Reem’s condition continued to deteriorate. “My husband’s salary is not enough for the treatment. We are extremely poor!”
Reem still suffers from malnutrition at this very moment, and her mother is eagerly waiting for any assistance to save her little daughter.
According to the UNICEF: “The severe malnutrition among Syrian children is on a continuous rise. The number of children between the ages of 6 months and 59 months suffering from severe acute malnutrition increased by 48% from 2021 to 2022”.
Soaring prices and inadequate income mean that millions of families are struggling to cover their expenses amidst an unprecedented economic crisis. Approximately 90% of the population in Syria is living in poverty according to the UNICEF, and this has a negative impact on children’s dietary intake. Before the earthquake on February 6, 2023, more than 3.75 million children in Syria were in need of food assistance, while 7 million children across the country required urgent humanitarian aid. Although the earthquake did not strike the east of Syria, its effects on food resources were significant in all Syrian regions.
I visited another child named Alia at her home in the village of Al-Zughair in Deir Ezzor. Her mother was cooking rice for her three children. The exhausted mother told me that her husband receives an insignificant salary for long working hours, which of course, is insufficient to provide food for the children.
Alia, one and a half year old, has been struggling, according to her mother: “I went to Abu Abdullah’s pharmacy, and the pharmacist asked me for get medical tests for my daughter.” The mother learned that her daughter was suffering from malnutrition. The mother told me that her husband was extremely sad and wished he had some money to buy all the necessary food and drinks.
Alia’s father says, “Medicines need to be provided to health centers, including mobile clinics, to make the delivery of life-saving supplies and services possible. Treating our children and delivering life-saving aid and services must become possible”.
He added, “Unless healthcare and protection are provided, a larger number of children will die every day in Deir Ezzor and in other parts of Syria. The history will judge us for all these deaths that could have been saved”.
Dr. Tariq, the director of Al-Kasra Hospital, said in our conversation, “The number of malnourished children received by Al-Kasra Hospital under the supervision of Relief International Organization ranges from 100 to 150 children aged between 7 months and 11 months during the months of April and May alone. The numbers of malnourished children and pregnant women are increasing, and the approximate number of malnourished pregnant women in Al-Kasra Hospital is between 50 and 70 since the beginning of May, with the numbers increasing every day. There is no nutrition specialist in the hospital to treat these cases”.
A pediatrician we met at the hospital, who preferred not to disclose his name, added, “The number of children we currently receive is increasing. The child’s malnutrition is caused by the mother’s own malnutrition, extreme poverty, high number of children for the mother, the mothers’ inability to breastfeed, as well as the mothers’ personal efforts to feed the child without consulting a doctor, infectious diseases in children that remain untreated and neglected, and contaminated and unclean drinking water”.
Since 2015, levels of food insecurity in Syria have increased by more than half, according to the statistics of the WFP. The eastern region of Syria has been considered as one of the poorest areas in the country even before the Syrian war. Today, with the significant changes and disruptions in the food program in Syria, the number of children at risk of malnutrition is threatened to increase, requiring both local and international action simultaneously.
