MOSCOW, June 7 (RIA Novosti) – The United Nations plans to raise more than $5 billion to aid victims of the ongoing civil war in Syria, a UN refugee agency said Friday.
More than half of Syria’s prewar population, or 10.25 million people, will require “life-saving assistance” by the year’s end, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a report.
At the outbreak of the conflict, in 2011, Syria’s population was 20.8 million. Since then, some 80,000 Syrians have died and millions more have fled to neighboring countries, the report said.
To sufficiently help the estimated 3.45 million refugees, as well as the 6.8 million in need within Syria, the UN has launched the fund-raising drive to collect a needed $5.2 billion, an agency spokesman was quoted by AFP as saying.
That amount of money, a would-be record in UN fund-raising for war refugees, is less than what the American people pay for ice cream in 32 days, said the report, posted on the agency’s website on Friday.
The fund-raising goal is more than twice the $2.2 billion the UN sought in 2003 for victims of the US invasion of Iraq.
