The UN calls the tragedy in Idlib “the greatest humanitarian horror story of the 21st century”. Thirteen million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes, or 60% of the country’s estimated population. The conflict has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians. According to Amnesty, by the end of the year, the number of people who had been internally displaced since 2011 stood at 6.7 million. Syria has seen its economy collapse, its currency depreciates and food prices rise sharply. 

The city of Homs has been hit hard by the crisis, now in its twelfth year. The area has suffered a shocking amount of destruction; almost every building bears the scars of war, and entire neighbourhoods – once bustling – are now abandoned and eerily quiet. 

The crisis is in its 12th year and the needs are growing and glaring: 14.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and an estimated 12 million people are food insecure (i.e. of the approximately 1.5 million people living in H. governorate, more than one fifth are in need of humanitarian assistance according to UN).

Fearing them dead or scattered in exile, we remained for a long time without news of a small team of volunteers, known on the spot during the pre-war years, to whom we were deeply befriended. In October 2014, miraculously, contact was re-established with those who were able to remain active. In order to evaluate what is feasible and to reinforce the local team, one of our team visited the site in 2014, 2016 and 2017. Since then, missions on-site have become impossible: postponed in 2019 due to the internal conflicts in Lebanon, which is a necessary passage to reach the Syrian border, and again in 2020 and 2021 in relation to the pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 in the country has only made the situation worse, making the task of humanitarian aid much more difficult and the governmental response even led at times to the deprivation of this aid. In this extreme situation, the local team continued its work unabated.