In the hills near the Lebanese border, an hour’s drive from downtown Damascus, much of a Syrian town is starving, residents and international humanitarian workers said.
The town, Madaya, is controlled by rebels and encircled by pro-government forces with barbed wire, land mines and snipers. The people in the town make soups of grass, spices and olive leaves. They eat donkeys and cats. They arrive, collapsing, at a clinic that offers little but rehydration salts. Neighbors fail to recognize neighbors in the streets because their faces are so sunken.
Syria, once classified as a middle-income nation, now reports malnutrition deaths. At least 28 people, including six babies, have died from hunger-related causes at a clinic in Madaya aided by Doctors Without Borders, medics there said.
The 42,000 people that the UN counts as trapped in Madaya are about a tenth of those stranded in besieged or hard-to-reach areas as conditions grow steadily worse.
Their plight represents a stark failure of international powers that has worsened even as they intensify military and diplomatic activities, all in the name of resolving the conflict.
This is happening as the UN plans a new round of peace talks for Jan. 25. It is happening amid escalating military interventions by Russia and the US.
In some ways, diplomats and humanitarian workers said, it is happening not just despite those efforts, but also because of them, as the warring parties flout international law while being courted for negotiations.
However, in Madaya and neighboring Zabadani, once popular mountain resorts, thoughts of political change have receded in the face of hunger. Hamoudi, 27, a business-school graduate who took up arms after the government’s crackdown on protests in 2011, said many people would surrender in order to eat, even though they expected arrests and retribution to follow.
“In the revolution I was dreaming of democracy, freedom,” Hamoudi said slowly in an interview via Skype, exhaustion evident in his voice. “Today all my dreams are food. I want to eat. I don’t want to die from starvation.”
Both Russia, the Syrian government’s most powerful ally, and the US have been carrying out airstrikes that they said are aimed at Islamic State militants, but the airstrikes have complicated the relief efforts.
Using hunger as a weapon flies in the face of international law. However, international and regional powers — such as Russia, Iran, the US and Saudi Arabia — are unable or unwilling to pressure their battlefield allies. The UN said that just 10 percent of its requests last year to deliver aid to besieged Syrians were approved.
That puts the UN in an awkward position: Helping to carry out local cease-fires that might permit aid for a time, but also reward commanders’ siege tactics.
The UN has repeatedly found itself in the middle of deals that made bargaining chips of access to food and medicine that should be unconditional. Some deals have required civilians to leave their homes for aid and protection, going against basic principles of humanitarian relief.
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