MERCY Corps is helping the thousands who have fled civil war to a makeshift desert city.
Making his way across the desolate land, a sea of small white dots slowly starts to become visible.
Leena and her young son
For the last few miles, Andras Beszterczey has been confronted with nothing but flat, open desert as far as the eye can see.
As he moves closer to Za’atari – the large Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, near the city of Mafraq – he realises that the tiny white dots he spotted in the distance were in fact endless rows of tents, which have been erected in preparation for the thousands of distraught Syrian families whose lives have been turned upside down by the country’s civil war.
“It’s completely desolate in one way because all you have are these tents, which at the time had been there for a week or even less but were already falling down and looked like they had been there for a year,” said the 25-year-old Middle East programme officer with Mercy Corps, as he recalls his first trip to the camp with the Edinburgh-based charity earlier this year. Continue reading
Syrian activists say a string of government airstrikes on rebel areas in the country’s north has killed at least 20 people, leveled buildings and forced residents to dig through mounds of rubble in search of survivors.
Human rights groups working inside Syria estimate that between 28,000 to 80,000 Syrians have been forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime over the past 19 months. This comes as Avaaz today releases testimony from family members who have had husbands, sons and daughters forcibly disappeared by the regime.
