In an ominous sign of possible donor fatigue, delegates to an international fund-raising conference for victims of the Syrian war pledged $3.8 billion on Tuesday, less than half the emergency humanitarian assistance sought by the United Nations for this year, even as the number of Syrians suffering mass displacement from the four-year-old conflict showed no sign of easing.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, attending the third annual donor conference in Kuwait, sought to frame the amount pledged in positive terms, calling it an “unprecedented show of solidarity” to ease the crisis confronting 12 million Syrians, or about half the country’s population, including nearly four million who have sought refuge in neighboring countries.
“The Syrian people are victims of the worst humanitarian disaster of our time,” he said in a speech to the conference posted on the United Nations website.
While no specific target had been set for the conference, emergency aid advocates expressed alarm over what they saw as an anemic response to the record $8.4 billion that the United Nations requested in December for all of 2015.
“While some donors have been generous in Kuwait, the total aid pledged is less than half the amount needed this year to help people in desperate humanitarian need,” Andy Baker, the Syria crisis manager for Oxfam International, said in a statement posted on the group’s website.
“Unless more donor countries massively step up in the wake of the conference, the increasing numbers of people fleeing their homes and struggling to survive will be less and less likely to receive assistance,” he said. “What does the international community expect millions of Syrians to survive on?”
The United States and Kuwait accounted for about a quarter of all pledges at the conference. The American delegation, led by Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, announced a $507 million commitment, the biggest single-country donation so far. Kuwait pledged $500 million.
Other prominent donors included members of the European Union, which jointly pledged about $1.2 billion, about double the amount committed by the European Union a year ago.
Ms. Power used her announcement in part to castigate the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, asserting that it “seems to make choices on the basis of how best to increase human suffering” in the conflict that began in March 2011.
She also sought to cajole other donors, saying that despite the largest humanitarian appeal ever undertaken by the United Nations, “too many countries are giving the same amount or even less than they have in the past.”
The conference was held against the backdrop of widening mayhem in the region, with the ascendance of the Islamic State militant group, the Syrian conflict’s spread to neighboring Iraq and a rapidly escalating crisis in Yemen.
Over the past few days, Syrian government forces were routed from Idlib, a provincial capital of 500,000 people in the north, by a coalition of Islamist insurgents, including the Nusra Front, a branch of Al Qaeda. Yacoub El Hillo, the United Nations relief coordinator for Syria, said that fighting had caused “numerous deaths and injuries” and displaced 30,000 people.
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