Syria: shocking images of starving baby reveal impact of food crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/23/syria-shocking-images-of-starving-baby-reveal-impact-of-food-crisis

Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul
Monday 23 October 2017



The continuing suffering of civilians living under siege in Syria has been brought into sharp focus by new images of a malnourished baby who later died of starvation in a suburb of Damascus controlled by the opposition.

The images, released on Monday by the news agency AFP, show Sahar Dofdaa, a one-month-old baby weighing less than 2kg, with sunken eyes and her ribs protruding through translucent skin. The child was being treated for malnutrition by a doctor in the town of Hamouria, in the eastern Ghouta region. She died on Sunday.

“The supplies are very low, and if it continues more kids will die,” said one aid official, who requested anonymity.

Tens of thousands of civilians in Ghouta are living under a blockade imposed by forces loyal to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. About 3.5 million people in Syria live in besieged or hard-to-reach areas, and the majority of those are in places militarily encircled by the Assad regime.

Infighting by local rebel forces and the hoarding of food supplies by merchants have worsened an already dire crisis.

Doctors and activists say food shortages are so severe that dozens of cases of malnutrition are being seen in local clinics and field hospitals. New mothers are unable to breastfeed their children because they themselves are undernourished, and products such as baby milk are almost non-existent.

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Yahya Abu Yahya, a doctor in the region, told AFP that out of 9,700 children examined in recent months, 80 were suffering from the most severe form of malnutrition, 200 had moderate acute malnutrition and 4,000 had nutritional deficiencies.

Sahar, the baby in the photographs, was unable to breastfeed because her mother did not have enough food to produce milk, AFP said.

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The government has limited the aid provided to those areas by international organisations and the UN, and recent bouts of infighting between rebels have made it more difficult to send aid. The shortage has given rise to a local black market controlled by unscrupulous merchants, which has worsened civilian suffering and made basic staples prohibitively expensive. Most families subsist on bread made of barley, olives and boiled plants.

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