Number of children who have fled Syria reaches a million, says U.N.

GENEVA | (Reuters) - The number of Syrian children forced to flee their devastated homeland will on Friday reach a million, half of all the refugees driven abroad by the conflict, the United Nations said.

Another two million Syrian minors are uprooted within their country and are often attacked or recruited as fighters in violation of humanitarian law, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR and U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.

UK says it thinks Syria's Assad was behind chemical attack

LONDON |(Reuters) - Britain said on Friday it believed forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were responsible for a chemical weapons attacks in the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus, saying it thought the Syrian government had "something to hide".

"I know that some people in the world would like to say that this is some kind of conspiracy brought about by the opposition in Syria," said British Foreign Secretary William Hague. "I think the chances of that are vanishingly small and so we do believe that this is a chemical attack by the Assad regime."

UNHCR: Syrian refugees flooding into Iraq

More than 15,000 civilians flowed across border into Iraq�s Kurdish region since Thursday, refugee agency says.

Thousands of Syrians have flowed across the border into Iraq’s Kurdish region to escape battles in their homeland, the UN refugee agency has said.
More than 15,000 refugees have crossed into Iraq in the latest influx since Thursday, with more expected to follow, UNHCR said.

Syrian refugees pour into Iraq at new crossing, U.N. says

GENEVA |(Reuters) - Thousands of Syrian refugees poured into the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq on Thursday, taking advantage of a new bridge along the largely closed border, the United Nations said on Friday.

Between 5,000 and 7,000 refugees followed a first group of some 750 people who crossed the pontoon bridge at Peshkhabour over the Tigris River, and more buses were seen dropping off families on the Syrian side, it said.

Audit of Syria refugees finds organized crime and child soldiers

By Tom Miles

GENEVA | Mon Aug 5, 2013 2:27pm EDT

(Reuters) - Many Syrians who have escaped their country are now desperate to escape from U.N.-run refugee camps, where women are not safe and teenage boys are recruited as soldiers to fight in the conflict, according to an internal U.N. report.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR is trying to cope with a massive humanitarian crisis, as 1.9 million Syrians have sought refuge abroad, mainly in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
The report, an self-evaluation of UNHCR's work in Syria entitled "From slow boil to breaking point", admits the United Nations could have done much better and "a far more substantial and coherent strategy is needed".
Organized crime networks are operating in the biggest refugee camp, Za'atari in Jordan, which is home to 130,000, it said. The camp is "lawless is many ways", with resources that are "constantly stolen or vandalized".
Preparations for a new camp needed to learn the lessons from Za'atari, including to "ensure the safety of women and girls".
Refugees can live outside the camp if they are "sponsored" by a Jordanian citizen, but many refugees are paying up to $500 to middlemen to get out, the report said.
In the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Domiz camp is critically overcrowded and living standards are "unacceptable" in many parts of the camp.
"There is currently no agreed strategy in place to deal with the existing refugee population in Northern Iraq or any future influxes into the territory," the report said, adding that UNHCR and NGOs held "directly opposing views" about work to help refugees living outside the camps.
Although UNHCR is planning to crack down on crime in Za'atari, partly by strengthening the role of the Jordanian police, "opposition to the plan, possibly of a violent nature, can be anticipated," the report said.
"Given the harsh physical conditions to be found in Za'atri, coupled with the high level of criminality in the camp, it is not surprising to hear refugees speaking of their desire to 'escape.'"
Increasingly that means returning to Syria, the report said, adding that returnees needed to be closely monitored to be sure they were not going back against their will.
One concern was "recruitment by armed groups, including of under-aged refugees", the report said, without elaborating.
A U.N. official told Reuters that there were suspicions that boys of 15 or 16 were often taken back to fight, chaperoned by an uncle, elder brother or other relative.
"It's a war crime," the official said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said child recruitment had not been a major problem until now because the opposition forces did not have enough arms and ammunition.
But the lifting of embargoes on supplying arms to opposition groups meant both sides would need more soldiers.
Even if it suspects child recruitment, the U.N. is almost powerless to stop suspected child soldiers because refugees have a right to return to their own country.
The report said many Syrian children were not attending school in Jordan or Lebanon, but the U.N. official said there was evidence that many were attending religious schools, or madrassahs.
There was also evidence of a new trend of minors, Europeans and North Africans from Tunisia and Algeria, who had "apparently crossed into Syria for the Jihad", the U.N. official said.
Syria was likely to see a repeat of the so-called "Birds of Paradise", children trained by al Qaeda to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq, the official said.
(Reporting by Tom Miles; editing by David Evans)

Tents, garages, shops: Syria refugees hide in Lebanon shadows

By Stephen Kalin

TRIPOLI, Lebanon |

(Reuters) - Atop a mountain lined with olive and cypress trees overlooking the Lebanese city of Tripoli, a disused shopping center houses nearly 1,000 refugees who have fled Syria's civil war.
In the space of a few months the once-empty four-storey complex has become one of more than 360 informal settlements of refugees surging into Lebanon, a country overwhelmed by a sudden influx from its larger neighbor's civil war.
"We have become like a small state," said Um Mohamed, who fled the Syrian city of Homs and became the first person to move into a vacant shop in the Tripoli mall, settling in the empty building with her three children in October.
Since then, it has become a bustling indoor town. Empty shops have been fitted with plywood facades and bedsheets for doors. Laundry hangs across the inner courtyard where men recline on foam cushions and dozens of children roam about. A young man cuts boys' hair while veiled women on the second storey sell carrots, lemons and watermelons.
"People are finding it increasingly hard to find adequate shelter, and even the shelter that they're finding and they're renting is not adequate, so people are really becoming desperate," UNHCR representative in Lebanon Ninette Kelley said.
The number of Syrian refugees in the region has doubled in the last four months as a two-year-old conflict entered a particularly bloody phase, and the brunt of the exodus is now being born by tiny Lebanon, a fragile country that shares the sectarian divisions that tore its neighbor apart.
Unlike other countries in the region, Lebanon refuses to let Syrian refugees move into formal camps, a step which would allow them to put down roots and more easily receive systematic aid.
Syrians are seeking shelter wherever they can find it: in garages, abandoned buildings, and makeshift tented settlements.
According to U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, 666,000 refugees have registered or are waiting to register in Lebanon, compared with 513,000 in Jordan, 431,000 in Turkey and more than 100,000 each in Iraq and Egypt.
Including those who are not claiming refugee status such as migrant laborers and their families, 1 million Syrians are now living among a population of just 4 million Lebanese.
MAKESHIFT SHELTER
Around the region, the welcome offered to Syrians is growing colder. Turkey officially maintains an "open border" policy but has also tightened security on its 900 km (600 mile) frontier, building barbed wire fences to make it more difficult to cross outside official gates. Jordan closed some crossings this year, stranding thousands of Syrians at the border, aid workers said.
Some Lebanese complain that the Syrians' arrival has led to sharp increases in rents and food prices, and put a strain on public services such as electricity, transport and hospitals.
In Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, an improvised camp near the village of Kfar Zabad is nestled between grape and peach groves a few kilometers from the Syrian border. About 60 tents made of wooden planks and worn fabric are packed onto a plot of cracked land turned to mud by streams of waste water.
Aminah sits in a bare tent and cradles a swaddling baby in her arms. The 20-year-old mother of two arrived from the Aleppo countryside two months ago and gave birth to the baby girl in the camp two weeks ago with no medical attention.
"There's no water, no electricity, no aid," she said.
At a nearby camp in Terbol, refugees beseech visiting aid workers to improve sanitation and other services. Formerly a settlement for migrant workers on privately owned land, it has little room for the refugees who arrived in recent months. They fear winter will see their cold tents flooded by heavy rains.
International aid groups are limited not only by budgets but also by political obstruction and legal restrictions.
Lebanon has been mired in political stalemate since March when its powerful Shi'ite militia Hezbollah openly joined the Syrian war on behalf of its long-time ally, President Bashar al-Assad. It fears large camps could offset the fragile balance between its own diverse religious and ethnic groups.
Refugees are hardly a new issue for Lebanon: 10 percent of the people living in Lebanon are descendents of Palestinians who arrived 65 years ago. They are still mainly confined to camps, denied citizenship and excluded from working in dozens of professions such as medicine and law. Their presence was an important factor in Lebanon's own 1975-1990 civil war.
Beirut is alarmed by examples like Jordan's Zaatari camp, which has attracted 115,000 Syrians since it opened a year ago and is now effectively Jordan's fourth most populous city.
UNHCR's Kelley called in February for the establishment of transit sites where refugees could be offered temporary food and shelter before other accommodation is found. Such a step would require authorization from the Lebanese government.
But without big formal camps to house refugees, Lebanon will have to host its Syrians ad hoc, in makeshift places like the one where Aminah rocked her newborn baby.
"There's nowhere else for us to go," she said.
(Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff)

Syrian refugees in Lebanon face suspicion

By BARBARA SURK
Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) -- They're lightweight, easy to assemble and have covers that are supposed to keep you cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The U.N. refugee agency wants to test these individual housing units with an eye toward using them as shelter for Syrians fleeing their country's civil war.

But the plan is meeting stiff resistance from Lebanese officials, who fear that elevating living conditions for Syrian refugees ever so slightly will discourage them from returning home once the fighting ends. That frustrates aid organizations who are desperately trying to manage the massive refugee presence across the country.

Lebanon's refusal to set up any kind of organized accommodation for tens of thousands of Syrians - including refugee camps or government-sanctioned tent sites - is a reflection of its own civil war demons. It underlines the nation's deep seated fear of a repeat of the 1975-1990 war, for which many Lebanese at least partly blame Palestinian refugees.

Many regard the Syrians with suspicion and are worried that the refugees, most of them Sunni Muslims, would stay in the country permanently, upsetting Lebanon's delicate sectarian balance and re-igniting the country's explosive mix of Christian and Muslim sects.

"It's the fear of everything permanent, or semi-permanent, because of the Palestinian experience in Lebanon," said Makram Maleeb, a program manager for a Syrian refugee crisis unit at Lebanon's Ministry for Social Affairs.

"Any move toward a camp situation is quite worrisome because it suggests a permanent situation for the refugees," he told The Associated Press.

Palestinians living in Arab countries - including the 450,000 in Lebanon - are descendants of the hundreds of thousands who fled or were driven from their homes in the war that followed Israel's creation in 1948. They remain in Lebanon's 12 refugee camps because Israel and the Palestinians have never reached a deal that would enable them to return to their homes that are now in Israel.

The civil war in Syria, now in its third year, has killed more than 100,000 people and uprooted millions from their homes. Many fled to Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, a short drive away from the capital, Damascus.

On any given day in Lebanon, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of refugees arrive in cars loaded with children and belongings. Their presence has swelled the country's population of 4.5 million by a fifth. It's an astounding statistic for the tiny country and represents the highest number of refugees per capita of any country in the region.

Officials say an estimated 1.2 million Syrians are now in Lebanon - including some 620,000 registered refugees. Most arrived over the past eight months.

With the government providing none of the facilities and land that authorities in Turkey, Jordan and Iraq have allocated for the refugees, many Syrians in Lebanon live in appalling conditions, finding shelter in slums, tents and tin shacks strung with laundry lines and wedged between farm lands outside towns and cities.

On a casual walk in Beirut, one finds Syrians sheltering in underground parking lots, under bridges and old construction sites with no running water, sanitation, electricity or protection from Lebanon's sizzling summers and its freezing winters.

"The kids get sick all the time here," said Raghda, a 48-year-old mother of eight, living in an abandoned police station in the eastern Lebanese town of Majdal Anjar, along with 21 other relatives. They are crammed into three rooms without proper sanitation or clean water.

About 10 percent of the refugees are accommodated in unfinished private houses, and others live in garages, shops and collective shelters, according to the UNHCR. Most of them - over 80 percent - rent accommodation that costs more than $200 a month on average.

Lebanese officials say they are aware of the magnitude of the crisis, the health risks involved and the possibility that deepening resentment of refugees among the hosting population could turn into an armed conflict inside Lebanon as the civil war drags on in Syria.

Still, they insist the government will not approve any plans for setting up refugee camps or sanction erecting any kind of structure specifically designed to accommodate refugee families on Lebanese soil no matter who designs it and who pays for it.

"It's distressing and everyone is feeling anxious, wondering if they will ever go back as the fighting goes on and on and on," Maleeb said.

Still, he said it was unlikely the housing unit would be approved.

Ninette Kelley, UNHCR representative in Lebanon, said the refugees "desperately want to return home." But having people live in appalling conditions will not force them out of Lebanon before the fighting stops in Syria, she said.

`"There is this psychological worry that if people are put in a semi-permanent structure, they will never leave," Kelley told the AP. They will leave, she said, adding that one of the greatest impediments of going home after the fighting ends is not having a place to live in Syria.

The 17.5-square-meter (yard) refugee housing unit would offer a family of five a "more dignified life in exile," said Kamel Deriche, UNHCR's operations manager in Lebanon, and enables refugees to dismantle it, pack it and carry it home to reuse as a temporary accommodation until their family home is rebuilt.

Compared to a tent, which has to be replaced every three to four years, the unit's life span is expected to be up to seven years. And the price of about $1,000 per unit makes it more economical, Deriche said.

"It's not a permanent structure and we are not establishing camps by any stretch of the imagination," Kelley said, adding that the unit would be only one of several shelter options for the agency to use.

A prototype of the prefabricated house designed by the Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA has been sitting in the front yard of UNHCR's Beirut headquarters for a month.

The agency has been lobbying Lebanese officials for permission to try out 15 units over a period of six months before they can be deployed, but so far to no avail. UNHCR also intends to test the units in climate conditions of northern Iraq and in Ethiopia, Deriche said.

Lebanese officials say the historic connotation of a tent for refugees, let alone a housing unit, weighs heavy on the nation that is still reeling from the devastating 15-year civil war. The Syrian fighting has frequently spilled over into Lebanon over the past two years, deepening tensions between pro- and anti-Syrian politicians, who have been unable to form a new government since the prime minister resigned in March.

"There will be no camps and family shelters, wooden or pre-fabricated, whatsoever in Lebanon," said Maleeb, the government official.

Anything to do with the Syrian refugees, he added, is "a big political decision, and one that cannot be taken by a caretaker government."

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Associated Press correspondent Diaa Hadid contributed to this report.

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Follow Barbara Surk at www.twitter.com/BarbaraSurkAP .

Japan's FM pledges more aid to Syrian refugees

ZAATARI, Jordan (AP) -- Japan's foreign minister says Tokyo will increase its aid to Syrian refugees living in a desert camp in Jordan and help provide better sanitation there.

Fumio Kishida's pledge followed his visit Friday to Zaatari camp, home to 120,000 Syrians and just across the border from Syria.

Kishida was shown the camp's limited and basic washing facilities, which lack shower areas and which have been blamed for poor sanitation in Zaatari.

Parched Jordan says it can do little and that the refugees are exhausting the country's meager water resources.

Kishida says that "considering the hot desert climate here, we feel the importance, indeed the urgency, to help out in this area."

He says Japan contributed $95 million to Syrian refugees who fled to other countries since the conflict erupted in 2011.