Cold Ravages Syria Refugees as Aid Falters

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by the war, many of them stumbling out of Syria during the summer wearing little more than T-shirts and flip-flops, now face the onslaught of winter with inadequate shelter, senior government officials and aid organizations say.

“It will be winter outside and winter inside,” said Mohamed Khair al-Oraiby, a burly 27-year-old who fled here over the summer with his wife and two infants. “We already wake up early because it is so cold.”

With temperatures already plunging to zero overnight in the hills framing this valley, the humanitarian crisis facing millions of displaced Syrians is deepening. More than a million people in need of aid remain out of reach of international relief efforts, the United Nations says.

The inability of international aid groups to cope with the crisis, which has mushroomed in recent months, is partly a question of access to war zones.

More than 400,000 people have fled Syria, and 1.2 million have been driven from their homes within the country, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Some 2.5 million people need humanitarian assistance, and the number keeps climbing. The United Nations said it had reached only one million of them.

But efforts have also been hampered by lack of resources. The United Nations is seeking some $487 million for refugees across the region, of which about 35 percent has been collected.

“The capacity of the international donor community to support the crisis is not happening at the same speed at which the crisis is unfolding,” said Panos Moumtzis, the regional coordinator for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Neighboring countries coping with the influx are developing their own plans: Jordan is seeking about $700 million, and Turkey, which has spent $400 million of its own money on state-of-the-art camps with three hot meals daily, is also now seeking aid.

Inside Syria, conditions are even worse. The distribution of aid is plagued by problems of access, security and a lack of organizations to carry out the work, according to aid officials.

Most deploy from Damascus, where fighting has been so fierce in recent weeks that aid workers have occasionally been instructed not to leave their houses. Some areas have fallen under the sway of shadowy jihadist forces that eye Western aid organizations as espionage networks.

In November, the International Committee of the Red Cross finally negotiated brief access to the old city of Homs with the fundamentalist militia that controls it. The locals jeered the relief workers for taking more than four months to reach them.

“We’ve been besieged for months,” yelled a man wearing camouflage fatigues in a video of the visit posted on YouTube, giving the thumbs-down sign. “Now it occurs to you to come? We don’t want you, we don’t want your food, and we don’t want anything from you.”

At least 20 areas within Syria are unreachable because of fighting, aid officials said. Vast swaths of countryside are also inaccessible, including much of the north, because the roads from Damascus are too dangerous.

Families in provincial Idlib are reverting to old methods to survive. In some villages lacking electricity for months, for example, residents have built wood-fired ovens in their backyards, and daylight now sets the rhythm of their lives. They sleep soon after sunset and rise at dawn.

Relief planning is difficult because numbers are elusive and communication is haphazard. In the long-embattled city of Homs, for example, the United Nations listed 223,000 people as receiving monthly food rations, which it used as the number of people in need. But when a fighting lull enabled the Syrian Red Crescent to take a survey, 492,000 people sought assistance.

The Syrian government has allowed only eight foreign aid organizations to operate; all were already working in Syria before the uprising started in March 2011, helping Iraqi refugees. Seven employees of the Syrian Red Crescent have been killed.