Aid Organizations Warn of Lost Generation of Syrian Children as Donors Meet for Syria Summit

Save the Children said in a report on Monday that school enrollment in Syria had fallen to 50 percent, the Guardian reports.

A quarter of school buildings have been destroyed, and many parents are “too frightened to send their kids to school,” the agency’s spokeswoman Caroline Anning added.

Enrollment in war-torn Aleppo is as low as 6 percent, while half of refugee children, who number more than a million, are not receiving any education, according to the report, which estimates that the long-term impact on Syria’s economy of 2.8 million Syrian children never returning to school could be as much as 5.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

The report’s release comes as nearly 80 governments and dozens of aid agencies will meet in Kuwait today for a U.N. summit that aims to secure pledges towards an $8.4 billion appeal for Syria.

As the Syrian crisis enters its fifth year, some 12.2 million people inside Syria are in desperate need of assistance, while more than 3.9 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt.

Officials hope that donor countries will provide more help to the states hosting the refugees, particularly Lebanon, where one in four residents is a Syrian refugee.

Oxfam calculated that nearly half of the world’s top donors did not give their fair share of aid in 2014 based on the size of their economies.

Last year’s pledge conference secured pledges of only $2.4 billion towards a $6.5 billion appeal target.

“Wealthy donor countries … must dig deeper into their pockets with pledge commitments than they did last year – failure to do so will have a devastating effect on millions of civilians in Syria and its neighboring countries,” Oxfam said in a statement ahead of the conference.

“The number of people in need of assistance in Syria and beyond continues to rise dramatically, while the funding to help them is not keeping up with that need.”

“With inadequate aid funds, more people in need will have to resort to desperate survival strategies such as child labor or early marriage,” the statement added.

“We must not lose a whole generation to war,” said Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme.

Turkey Moves to Close Border Gates with Syria

“After maintaining an open-door policy throughout the four-year conflict in neighboring Syria, Turkey has moved this month to close the two remaining border gates between the countries, shutting out displaced Syrian refugees amid fears of a potential terrorist attack,” the New York Times reports.

Turkey has kept its borders open to refugees since the beginning of the conflict, but Turkish authorities have temporarily closed border crossings in the past as a safety precaution.

Most recently it closed the border crossings of Oncupinar and Cilvegozu in Turkey’s southern Hatay province on March 9, in response to intensifying violence in Aleppo.

“Turkish officials have said that the decision to keep the crossings closed was necessary because of intelligence pointing to a terrorist plot orchestrated by the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad,” according to the New York Times.

While the border remained open to trucks delivering aid, the gates have been closed to individuals trying to cross over into Turkey for the past two weeks.

Now, people seeking refuge in Turkey are left with few options beyond crossing illegally with human smugglers, whose main routes were recently cut off by the Turkish military.

Thus far, Turkey has taken in nearly two million refugees from Syria, but has struggled to stem the flow of foreign jihadists through its porous 560-mile border with Syria.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Islamic State controls nearly half of Turkey’s border with Syria, posing a great challenge to Western efforts to prevent foreign fighters from using the frontier as a gateway to the battlefields of Iraq and Syria.

Turkey, a vocal opponent of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has laid out several conditions for playing a larger role in the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. Most notably it has said its ultimate goal is defeat of the Assad regime, while the U.S. appears to prioritize battling the Islamic State before dealing with the regime in Damascus.

Syria Gets Russian Weapons Supply in Deals Signed Since the Conflict Began

Russia, the second largest weapons supplier in the world, has been supplying arms to Syria under contracts signed since the conflict began in 2011, as well as under previous deals, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said.

In an interview published by Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Monday, Assad appeared to contradict a claim by Russia that any Russian arms supplies to Syria were agreed before the conflict began, Reuters reports.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not confirm whether Moscow was supplying arms to Damascus.

“In fact, Moscow has always highlighted that there have been and are no embargoes on military cooperation. There are no legal limitations [on] us,” he told reporters.

The comments on the relationship between Moscow and Damascus follow an interview in which Assad claimed that ISIS had been gaining recruits since the beginning of U.S.-led airstrikes against the militant group.

He estimated that ISIS was attracting 1,000 recruits a month in Syria.

Washington is seeking a negotiated settlement to Syria’s civil war that excludes Assad; however, it has made clear that its top priority in Syria is to fight the militant group.

Russia, a longtime ally of Assad, is hosting meetings in Moscow on April 6–9 between some of the more moderate Syrian opposition groups and envoys from the government.

Expectations of any type of breakthrough are low after a first round of peace talks in January failed to produce concrete results.

Many Syrian opposition members did not attend the meeting, saying they would only attend meetings that led to the removal of the Syrian president from power, while the regime insisted that the focus of the negotiation should be on countering “terrorism” – its term for armed resistance to its rule.

Recommended Reads

• Agence France-Presse: Russia, Iran, Syria Share Same Vision: Assad
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• Agence France-Presse: Syria Launches Cigar Business as War Rolls On
• The Guardian: Syria’s Lost Generation: Report Counts Cost of Collapse in Education System
• Reuters: Syria Taps World Wheat Market as Stocks Run Down