The footage supports King Abdullah’s plea for more assistance from the worldwide community.
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France: Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has pledged about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) from 2016 to 2018.
The apparent success of the London conference was in stark contrast to the floundering political talks to end the Syrian civil war.
After U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura put the Geneva talks on hold late on Wednesday, he said he would travel to the London conference as the plight of Syrian refugees would provide an incentive to restart negotiations.
“We are doing our best against very hard odds”, the king said, but added: “We have reached our limit”.
A 7-year-old Syrian girl with cancer has become the first of an estimated 1,000 refugees who are being brought to Italy on humanitarian grounds in a pilot project aimed at dissuading refugees from embarking on deadly sea crossings. Some 700,000 Syrian children in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries are out of school, according to a report by the Malala Fund founded by Pakistani education campaigner and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
The U.S.’s pledge of $600 million will go toward providing shelter, water, medical care, food, protection “and other necessities” for Syria refugees, the Obama administration said.
“Taken together, what we are delivering today can play a crucial role in preventing refugees from feeling they need to risk their lives on the treacherous journey to Europe”, he said. The talks were paused as fighting intensified in Syria: The regime of President Bashar Assad, with backing from Russian airstrikes, cut off the main rebel supply line between Aleppo and Turkey this week, Alison Meuse reported Wednesday.
The U.N.’s Ban told the conference it was “deeply disturbing that the initial steps of the talks have been undermined by the continuous lack of sufficient humanitarian access, and by a sudden increase of aerial bombing and military activities within Syria”. He said he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had spoken by phone Thursday and agreed to continue discussing “how to implement the cease-fire”.
He said that “the coming days should be used to get back to the table not to secure more gains on the battlefield”.
David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary who now heads the International Rescue Committee, has called for 1 million work permits for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, saying it was time to “end the fiction” that the crisis was a short-term problem.
Representatives of Syrian charities attending the event noted that many more colleagues had been unable to make it as they had not been granted visas.
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Conference co-host Britain has pledged 1.2 billion pounds ($1.75 billion) in new aid by 2020, and Secretary of State John Kerry is due to announce a big US commitment later.
