BRUSSELS, April 25. /TASS/. About 13.1 million people in Syria, almost half of them children, need urgent humanitarian help, according to the final declaration adopted by the participants of the international donors’ conference on "Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region" which took place on April 24-25 in Brussels and was hosted by the European Union and co-chaired by the United Nations.
"Nearly 13.1 million people, almost half of whom are children, urgently need humanitarian assistance and protection inside the country," the document says.
It notes that, according to information received in 2017, 2.3 million people are still living in besieged and hard-to-reach areas. "More than 12 million people have now been displaced, including more than 5.6 million refugees hosted in neighbouring countries and 6.6 million displaced inside Syria," the conference participants noted in the resolution. The document also notes the merits of the states that hosted most part of refugees from Syria - Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq.
The participants of the international donors’ conference in Syria collected a total of $4.4 bln, said Christos Stylianides, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management, after the conference. So, the conference organizers, the EU and the UN, have failed to collect the expected sum. An EU representative had told reporters in Brussels ahead of the donors’ conference that the EU expected to gather as much as in the previous year, that is $6 bln.
Russian Permanent Representative to the EU Vladimir Chizhov said on the sidelines of the conference that considerable part of the sum that was gathered at the second donors’ conference would be used to support refugees in Syria’s neighbor states.