GENEVA — Syrians are pouring across the border to escape fighting in their battered homeland and diarrhoeal disease has broken out in rural areas near Damascus, UN aid agencies said yesterday. More than 170,000 Syrians have been registered in four neighbouring countries (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey), the United Nations refugee agency said.
Some 3,500 Syrians fleeing the northern areas of Aleppo, Azaz, Idlib and Latakia reached Turkey's Hatay and Kilis provinces between Tuesday and Wednesday, spokesman Adrian Edwards of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said. "There has been a further sharp rise in the number of Syrians fleeing to Turkey," Edwards told a news briefing.
"There are now almost 65,000 Syrians in 9 camps in Turkey, though not all yet formally registered. To put this in perspective, about 40 per cent arrived in August." A Syrian air strike in the border town of Azaz on Wednesday killed 30 people, a local doctor said.
Overnight, more than 1,000 Syrians arrived in Jordan, Edwards said. The UNHCR is working to improve the ratio of people to toilets — currently 40 to one — in Za'atri camp which holds nearly 8,000 of some 47,000 refugees registered in Jordan.
The humanitarian situation in Syria has deteriorated as fighting escalates, cutting off civilians from food supplies, healthcare and other assistance, UN agencies say.
Some 1.2 million people are uprooted within the country, many staying in schools or other public buildings, UNHCR quoted the UN's regional humanitarian relief co-ordinator as saying.
UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, ending a visit to Syria, said on Thursday up to 2.5 million people needed aid in the country, where President Bashar al Assad's forces have been fighting dissidents seeking his overthrow for 17 months.
There has been an outbreak of diarrhoea among residents in part of the province of Rural Damascus because the water supply has been contaminated by sewage, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
"In one pocket of Rural Damascus there are 103 suspected cases of ecoli. Laboratory testing is still going on," Richard Brennan, director of WHO's emergency risk management and humanitarian response department, said. "It is due to contamination of the water supply."
"We have heard of other pockets (of diarrhoeal disease) in other areas of Rural Damascus, but have no details," he said.
Sixty-one children under age 10 are among the 103 cases discovered by health workers in a mobile clinic, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said. — Reuters
