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U.N. reveals nightmares inside starved Madaya

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U.N. reveals nightmares inside starved Madaya
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In this Monday, Jan. 11, 2016 photo, residents talk to reporters in the besieged town of Madaya, northwest of Damascus, Syria. (AP)

The Associated Press, Beirut Wednesday, 13 January 2016

Siege and starvation have left the rebel-held Syrian town of Madaya in a nightmarish state not seen elsewhere in the country, a U.N. official who traveled there said Tuesday, as some 300 residents fled and desperately needed humanitarian aid arrived.

The former mountain resort, besieged since last summer by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, came to international attention in recent weeks as reports of starvation emerged and activists shared images of emaciated children and old men widely on social media.

Sajjad Malik, the U.N. refugee agency's chief in Damascus, told journalists that the "very grim" picture was the result of a blockade of food, medicine and other supplies that left the town in a "desperate situation."

"There is no comparison to what we saw in Madaya," he said from Damascus by telephone to Geneva. "It is a place where you could see there are people, but there is no life... What we saw is something that was pretty horrible."


Residents who say they have received permission from the Syrian government to leave the besieged town depart after an aid convoy entered Madaya. (Reuters)

Malik described seeing shivering, malnourished children and young adults, saying "most of them had not had bread or rice or vegetables or fruit for months." He said a kilogram of rice would sell there for $300, and noted one account of one person selling a motorcycle to buy 5 kilos of rice.

A day earlier, the U.N. said that about 400 people in the town's hospital needed to be evacuated immediately for medical treatment as starvation and other factors had left them on the brink of death.

Syrian authorities, rebels and aid groups have yet to respond. The U.N. goal was to obtain safe passage to evacuate the 400 later on Tuesday.


Aid convoys carrying food, medicine and blankets, leave the Syrian capital Damascus as they head to the besieged town of Madaya on January 11, 2015. (AFP)

U.N. officials said it was too early to determine whether anyone had died of hunger. But the aid group Doctors Without Borders has said that 23 people died of starvation at a health center it supports in Madaya since Dec. 1, including six infants and five adults over 60.

Various U.N. officials have described how locals had been forced to forage for food, such as risking walks in minefields to collect grass or cooking up "leaf soup," and were burning cardboard to stay warm in their homes.

Madaya is not the only place in Syria suffering from siege, an age-old tactic of war that belligerents continue to use despite international laws banning it. The U.N. says some 15 municipalities across Syria are currently blockaded, with no one able to get in or out.


A toddler is held up to the camera in this still image taken from video said to be shot in Madaya on January 5, 2016. (Reuters)

Two Shiite villages in the north, under siege by rebels, face similar circumstances, with food and medicine scarce. Residents are said to be eating grass to survive and undergoing surgery without anesthesia.

On Monday, convoys carrying food, medical and other supplies reached Madaya around the same time as another convoy arrived in the twin Shiite villages — called Foua and Kfarya — which are far more remote and difficult for media to access.

The operation marked a small, positive development in a bitter conflict now in its fifth year that has killed a quarter of a million people, displaced millions of others and left the country in ruins.

Another tiny improvement in Madaya came with the evacuation of some 300 civilians, mostly women and children, who left the town near the Lebanese border on foot and were then transported to government-run temporary shelters.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that tracks both sides of the conflict, said the civilians had separately arranged with government forces to leave the city, with some heading to shelters set up in schools and similar places in the area and nearby capital, Damascus.

The harshness of the recent starvation reports have underscored the urgency for new Syria peace talks that the U.N. is hoping to host in Geneva on Jan. 25.


A Syrian man looks at pictures displayed under a tent during a demonstration on January 10, 2016 in the northern city of Aleppo in solidarity with the besieged town of Madaya. (AFP)

The U.N. says 4.5 million Syrians are living in besieged or hard-to-reach areas and desperately need humanitarian aid, with civilians prevented from leaving and aid workers blocked from bringing in food, medicine, fuel and other supplies.

Elsewhere in Syria, the official state news agency SANA said the army has seized "full control" of a strategic rebel-held town in the northwestern province of Latakia, a stronghold of Assad's minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

SANA said army units backed by pro-government militiamen from the National Defense Forces captured Salma on Tuesday. Salma is in the mountains of Latakia province and is predominantly inhabited by Alawites.

The SANA report, which would mark a significant military victory, could not be immediately confirmed. Opposition activists earlier reported fierce clashes between Syrian pro-government troops and insurgents in and around Salma.

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People carry posters during a sit-in calling for the lifting of the siege off Madaya, in front of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Beirut, Lebanon January 8, 2016. (AFP)

The situation for over 1 million refugees in neighboring Lebanon meanwhile appears to be worsening because of new residency laws.

Human Rights Watch said the Lebanese laws are putting the refugees in danger by preventing them from renewing their residency, arguing that the policies "set the stage for a potentially explosive situation."

The regulations, adopted a year ago, have forced refugees to either return to Syria, where they are at risk of persecution, torture or death, or to stay in Lebanon illegally, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, the New York-based rights group said in a report published Tuesday.

Of the 40 refugees interviewed for the report, only two have been able to renew their residencies since January 2015.

Last week, Lebanon forcefully repatriated 407 Syrians after they were left stranded at Beirut airport. Amnesty International called the action "an outrageous breach of Lebanon's international obligations."

Last Update: Wednesday, 13 January 2016 KSA 10:24 - GMT 07:24

TOPICS

SYRIA MADAYA STARVATION UNITED NATIONS

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http://english.alarabiya.net/en/New...reveals-nightmares-inside-starved-Madaya.html
 
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AFAIK, siege is perfectly legal in times of war. So what's the fuss?
 
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AFAIK, siege is perfectly legal in times of war. So what's the fuss?
I hope one day u would have to live it then we will see the fuss.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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AFAIK, siege is perfectly legal in times of war. So what's the fuss?

The problem is that non-combatants are being denied access to food, medical supplies and other items of necessity.
 
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That's the point of siege.

No its not, if its an enemy fortification then it is perfectly legal but starving civilians is by no means an acceptable means of warfare. Even with the enemy maintaining hold, non-combatants would be provided safe passage under any such situation.
 
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all these fruits are from arab spring . nations whom become so crazy those days now have to harvest it
 
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It's puzzling that a ruling group which stages drama's based on a siege and starvation of some people more than a thousand years ago; should hypocritically and so cynically engage in the siege and starvation of thousands of people today.

I think the Sunni Arab residents of Syria have more in common with the victims of Karbala than the billionaire Ayatollahs of Iran and Lebanon today.
 
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A humanitarian aid convoy has entered the besieged town of Madaya in southern Syria, where people are said to be dying of starvation. Locals say rebels are charging them $250 for a kilogram of rice, an RT crew on the spot says.



The UN confirms the convoy’s presence in the city. Lorries are carrying basic food items as well as water, baby food, blankets, medicines and surgical supplies.

"Two trucks carrying food and two others full of blankets entered Madaya at 5:00 pm [15:00 GMT]," an official from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent also told AFP.

Simultaneously, first aid convoys arrived in the villages of Foah and Kefraya besieged by rebels in the northern Syrian province of Idlib, the BBC reports.

Several convoys consisting of 60 lorries operated by the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Syrian Red Crescent and the World Food Program left for Madaya, Foah and Kefraya on Monday morning. Earlier, the UN said it had received credible reports of people dying of starvation in these settlements.

Humanitarian aid on 39 trucks is expected in Madaya, RT’s Murad Gazdiev said, reporting from the area.

The humanitarian aid comes thanks to an agreement between the warring sides in the areas where thousands of people are under siege.

Media coverage is low, and there are no Western journalists there, according to Gazdiev.

However, since the start of January, social media and MSM have been flooded with reports, saying many have died of starvation in the besieged town of Madaya, and that government forces loyal to President Assad are to blame.

Various media outlets, including the Telegraph, the Independent, BBC, CNN and Fox news said Syrians were eating domestic animals, and had been left without any help. Some media didn’t bother to re-check the authenticity of images allegedly showing dying Madaya residents.
No one has as yet been able to confirm that the images are actually authentic. RT decided to investigate the photos.

One haunting image posted on Arab-speaking social media shows a starving man supposedly lying somewhere in the streets of Madaya, a town with a population of about 9,000 people.

"The victims of starvation caused by Bashar Assad, Hezbollah and Iranian militias on Madaya and Al-Zabadani,”says the caption under the image.

However, the story behind the starving man turned out to be fabricated. In fact, he starved to death in the city of Ghouta a year ago, according to the Syrian American Medical Society. The picture was taken on January 13, 2015.

“Mohammad Yoususf An-Najjar, disabled, from Damascus died on 13 January due to extreme cold and lack of food during the government forces’ siege of Eastern Ghouta,” the Syrian network of human rights said.

An image of a Syrian girl that appeared in Arab media prompted global condemnation of Assad’s policies. It was claimed she had turned into a lifeless shadow of herself due to extreme starvation.

However, the girl appears to be safe and sound in Jordan. According to MBC TV, this picture was taken in the streets of Amman, the Jordanian capital, in January 2014.

An image published by the Telegraph and Aljazeera shows a starving boy, who they said was in Madaya.

However, it turned out that a YouTube video featured the Syrian boy in May 2015, before the crisis in the town started.

Another horrendous picture of a starving man in Madaya has turned out to be a drug addict (or refugee, according to other sources) taken in Europe in 2009. His eyes were even Photoshopped to hide the fact they are blue. The image originally appeared on Al Jazeera. It was subsequently deleted, but not before it had been retweeted many times.



The Red Cross said they can’t confirm the authenticity of the images.

First aid convoys enter besieged Syrian town of Madaya — RT News

Everyone is doing propaganda to suit their needs including Western & Russia but ultimately it was the people sufferings and natives there who are most responsible to invite outsiders to solve their own created issues. FSA is bad, Al Nusra is bad, IS is bad so is Assad government bad. But we need to protect the functioning government with compromise to save middle East.
 
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Besieged Syrian Town Has Food — But 'Moderate Rebels' Won't Distribute It (VIDEO)

The Syrian town of Madaya is controlled by 'moderate' rebels who are hoarding food for themselves

Western television viewers are being bombarded with daily reports about the savage Syrian Army and its barbaric siege of the 'moderate' rebel-controlled town of Madaya. If you listen to the media like a responsible taxpayer should, Assad is personally starving all the women and children living in Madaya.

The problem is that according to Madaya residents, there is food, it's just being withheld by Al-Nusra Front and other bastions of democratic values:


Excerpts:

The anti-government groups are nothing but traders of people's blood. They only cared about securing food supplies for themselves and their families, and sell the rest to people for astronomical prices.

And:

Ahrar al-Sham and the Nusra Front have food but they do not feed anybody
. We had to make do by eating grass.

Assad must go!

Besieged Syrian Town Has Food — But 'Moderate Rebels' Won't Distribute It (VIDEO)
 
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Oh another propaganda, this is expected since the moderate beheaders and their isis brothers are being spanked in every front possible from rural damascus to northern latakia to every part of aleppo and even in daraa and sheik miskeen. :lol:
 
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