UN official: Optimism in east Aleppo because guns are silent

“Nothing prepared us for what we saw inside there,” Malik said. “The destruction is at a level that is hard to imagine.”

But one encouraging thing was that amid the rubble, children were coming out to play and people were starting to talk about reclaiming their lives, he said.

“The immediate and urgent needs are enormous,” Malik said, including cleaning up huge amounts of rubble, addressing concerns about families that have been separated, and getting youngsters traumatized by war back to school for the first time in more than five years.

“What we’re doing is just the beginning,” he stressed, adding that the U.N. has asked for reinforcements to cope with the urgent needs.

“Aleppo’s reconstruction is going to take a much longer time and way more resources than we have right now,” Malik said. “Even in the medium-term we’re going to need more resources.”

He said the U.N. can now operate in all but one district of eastern Aleppo where explosives are being cleared. Some 20,000 people are receiving hot meals twice a day and 40,000 are getting fresh-baked bread, and there are also seven mobile clinics and 12 mobile teams visiting east Aleppo every day, he said.

Malik said of the 116,000 recently displaced people from east Aleppo, roughly 80,000 went to the government-controlled western part of the city and 36,000 went to rebel-held Idlib, some under the cease-fire deal brokered by Russia and Turkey.

Malik said he couldn’t estimate the population in east Aleppo but he said there are about 1.5 million people in the city as a whole, including 400,000 internally displaced people who came to western Aleppo and have been supported by the U.N. and its partners in recent years.

Some 4 million people lived in the city before Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, with various rebel groups fighting to oust Assad and his government.

Edith M. Lederer, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

UN official: Optimism in east Aleppo because guns are silent

What's Trending