Report sheds light on catastrophic poverty in Syria
Entering its fifth year, Syrian civil war has plunged 80 percent of its people into poverty, shrunken life expectancy to 55 years and resulted in an economic loss estimated at over $200 billion according to latest UN-backed report.
The report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research circulated Wednesday paints a devastating picture of the "systematic collapse and destruction" of Syria's economic foundations.
The result, it said, is an alienated population and a government with waning sovereignty over its territory and resources, extremely high inflation and mass unemployment.
The report was supported by the UN Development Program and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
After four years of civil war, Syria has become a "catastrophic" disaster with society falling apart at the seams, life expectancy plummeting, joblessness growing and millions of children not attending school according to the UN-backed report.
In 2010, life expectancy in Syria was at almost 80 years and today the life expectancy has dropped to almost 55 years, according to the report.
The conflict began to radicalize after President Bashar al-Assad's regime hit back at peaceful demonstrators in March 2011. The conflict has given birth to dozens of rebel militias, including the Islamic State, and led to the destruction of major Syrian cities and countryside.
According to the report, survival is an issue for the majority of Syrians as the economy is no longer stable – unemployment has surged to 57.7 percent from 15 percent when the uprising started in 2011.
The report also revealed that four out of five Syrians live in poverty while two-thirds are unable to secure basic food and essentials for daily living. Syria "has become a country of poor people," the report warns.
Economic loss since 2011 exceeds $200 billion. “The armed conflict has depleted the capital and wealth of the country,” researchers concluded. “The continuing closure of businesses and the shedding of labor have resulted in a fundamental restructuring of the economy, with a lacerating contraction of most economic sectors.”
Doctors killed
US-based Physicians for Human Rights on Wednesday blamed Syrian government forces for 88 percent of its recorded attacks on hospitals and almost all recorded killings of medical workers during the country's four-year conflict.
As the war enters its fifth year, the group said that Islamic State militants, who have captured swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, have executed four health professionals and 16 attacks on medical facilities in the past 17 months.
"To be clear, that these numbers are significantly lower than those by the government does not make these acts less criminal. Each execution of a doctor and each attack on a health facility is a war crime," Widney Brown, Physicians for Human Rights' director of programs, told a news conference.
Syria's UN mission was not immediately available to comment.
Brown said each attack and death documented by the group had been confirmed by three independent sources and corroborated using satellite imagery before and after the dates of the attack and through sources in the field.
In a new report, the group accused Syrian government forces of being responsible for 97 percent of the unlawful killings of 610 medical personnel. Physicians for Human Rights said 139 of those deaths were a result of torture or execution.
Brown said the group used experts to establish what weapons were used in each attack, which allowed them to apportion blame.
In the past four years there were 233 illegal attacks on 183 medical facilities, of which Syrian government forces were responsible for 88 percent, Physicians for Human Rights said.
"The United Nations Security Council has utterly failed in its duties. These crimes rightly belong before the International Criminal Court," said Susannah Sirkin, Physicians for Human Rights' director of international policy and partnerships.
Russia and China vetoed a bid in May last year to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the civil war.
More than 210,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, which began when peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 degenerated into an armed insurgency following a fierce security crackdown.
The United Nations says some 12.2 million Syrians need assistance, while 3.8 million people have fled the country and about 7.6 million in Syria are displaced.
