an estimated 6.6 million syrian refugees
are living
outside their country's borders after
years of civil war
many are facing a grim winter in
makeshift accommodation
around the middle east and europe turkey
has taken in the most
more than three and a half million
people tiny lebanon
has taken in about a million and jordan
more than six hundred thousand
in europe germany has taken in 1.1
million but millions more
uprooted people remain stuck in syria
itself
our next report looks at a camp in idlib
province
after heavy rain the entire camp turns
to a muddy bog
and the already terrible conditions get
even worse as winter intensifies
and the temperatures plummets
fuels her stove with whatever she can
find or afford
if you don't have any money to buy wood
to keep the kids warm then you just have
to buy whatever's cheapest
this plastic rubbish is bad for them
though the children
constantly have coals and are coughing
four years ago rahaf's daughter reham
narrowly escaped
death the stove exploded because they
were using bad quality kerosene
reham who's now 12 suffered agonizing
disfiguring burns
the family cannot afford expensive
reconstructive surgery
twenty kilometers away in the hospital
in bab al-hawa
dr al-sheikh says he's treating more and
more patients with respiratory illnesses
which spread more easily in winter the
doctors used to send serious cases
across the border to turkey for
treatment
but due to coronavirus that board is now
closed
luckily covert has not established
itself in the camp
yet
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the heating methods are unhealthy and
directly damage the respiratory
system the damage to people's airways
makes it very easy for them to be
infected with coronavirus
the bad heating makes infection far more
likely there's a direct effect
meaning the people here are highly
vulnerable but it will probably be a
long time before these syrian refugees
get vaccinated
in the meantime the abbas family has
much bigger concerns
than the coronavirus
my biggest hope is that somehow the
situation for my daughter improves
so she can play with other children
again go to school again
and just live like other children that's
my greatest wish
this is the fifth winter the family has
spent in a tent
in the northwestern syrian province of
idlib
we're now joined by bahia srikem at the
jordan
capital amman she's the syria response
policy and advocacy advisor at the
norwegian refugee
council mrikem thanks for talking to dw
today
the family we just heard about has lived
in this camp for five years
how common are stories like theirs
thank you for receiving me hi good
morning um their story represents the
story of many internally displaced
syrians and refugees outside syria as
well
um in northern syria uh the province of
idlib that we just
uh saw in the heard in the
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uh in the reportage there are today 2.7
million internally displaced people
in more than a thousand camps this is
roughly the population of paris
in an area that is not bigger than twice
the luxembourg
so it's very overcrowded and 80 percent
of these internally displaced people are
children and women most of them have
been displaced several times
because of course they flee the bombs
but then the conflict advance
and the bombs keeps following them some
of these families
have been displaced more than five times
and
in the camps inside syria today like you
like you heard already
the situation is that the camps are
overcrowded people live
in tents and every time there is a rain
the tent is destroyed and they have to
they either lose all the little
belongings they still have
or they have to ask for a new tent and
then rebuild again
everything including sometimes their
dignity um
two days ago i was speaking to uh to um
to a family
uh and the dad name is abu
suleiman he was telling me that in syria
families especially in rural areas are
big
so he for himself have two girls and uh
two boys sorry and seven girls he also
take cares of his
parents so mom and dad they all live in
two towns
and they have been displaced more than
three times in the past
uh five years i think he was asking for
one thing he said
i need a bathroom because in the camps
in northern syria
often they didn't they don't even have a
bathroom so he said i don't need money i
don't need food i don't need water i
just need a bathroom
because i need my dignity to be back so
this is how it looks like now
northeaster you talk about overcrowded
cams it's a cold winter how prepared are
these camps to face
a possible outbreak of the coronavirus
so it's been a year now since the
beginning of the outbreak
of the pandemic outbreak that the
humanitarian community is trying to
prepare for
the outbreak inside syria hopefully
the numbers right now are still low even
though they're increasing very much
in the past three months they have been
increasing a lot we have been trying to
build
quarantine centers to increase the
number of beds to increase the number of
ventilators for people to be able to to
to survive
in case of of an outbreak of the
pandemic
we are also distributing hygiene kids
the humanitarian community is trying as
much as possible to protect also
humanitarian workers
who are in the front line of our work so
we are trying to protect
the employees and the the the people
that are living in the camps
as much as we can we also try to raise
funding
to increase um to to increase our
response
the problem is that the pandemic the
coronavirus endemic
has been added to already is an
additional layer to an already very
difficult
thing where they are facing
conflict endpoint sorry mr kem that's
all we've got time for today thank you
very much for taking
this couple of minutes to talk to us
today
thank you