In a new report entitled “Fueling the Fire,” which was released on Friday, a group of non-government organizations (NGOs) described the fifth year of Syria’s civil war as the worst yet, with at least 50,000 deaths and almost a million civilians forced to flee their homes, Deutsche Welle informs.
The report by charities including CARE International, Oxfam, Action Aid, Save The Children and several Syrian groups, said some 200,000 homes had been partly or completely destroyed, an increase of 20 percent from 2014.
According to the 33-page document, around 1.5 million more people were in need of humanitarian aid and an additional 400,000 children were no longer in school due to the violence.
The authors of the report put the responsibility for the caused deaths and damages both on Russia’s air campaign, which began in September and the US-led coalition, which had caused deaths and damage to civilian areas through its aerial bombardments. France and the UK, which were late in joining the US-led coalition to conduct airstrikes, also came under criticism, between them spending hundreds of millions of dollars on weapons, the document claimed.
The source reminds that since the conflict erupted on March 11 2011, more than half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22.4 million people has been internally displaced or forced to flee their homeland.
UN estimates from last August put the total death toll from nearly five years of civil war at more than a quarter of a million.
