Tag: financing humanitarian aid

Humanitarian Deadlock in Northeastern Syria ?

Residents of the Sahlat al Banat camp lining up in front of the tent. © Juliette Elie

Under the already heavy sun of a September morning, about fifty people wait among the dusty tents of the Sahlat al Banat camp in northeastern Syria. As the vehicle arrives, a murmur rises in front of the tent: everyone pleads their case, hoping to be registered on the list of one hundred medical consultations scheduled for the coming days.

Since 2018, more than 2,000 families have taken refuge on the outskirts of the vast landfill site of Raqqa. From the towns of Deir ez-Zor or Maadan, they fled successive offensives that put an end to several years of Islamic State control. Over time, shelters have multiplied: as far as the eye can see, sheets of fabric, blankets, and tarpaulins—sometimes marked with the UNHCR logo—bear witness to the gradual withdrawal of humanitarian aid. A heavy odor hangs over the camp, a mix of waste and burning plastic that clings to the air and to the clothes. Here, children sort through mountains of garbage, searching for pieces of metal they can sell for a few cents. For many, it is the only means of survival.

Naji Al Matrood, teacher with the NGO Solinfo. © Juliette Elie

For several years now, we at SOLINFO have been running psychosocial support workshops for about a hundred children every month. For an hour or two, they can escape their daily lives and simply be children again—no longer worrying about how many scraps of metal they collected or how many Syrian pounds they managed to earn. Under this tent, teacher Naji Al Matrood constantly imagines new ways to capture the children’s attention and restore to them the lightness of their age.

My role as a doctor and the association’s medical coordinator strengthens this support by providing both medical care and preventive action, including hygiene awareness sessions and the distribution of kits containing essential items: toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, nail clippers, and disinfectant solution.

These moments spent with the children also reveal the daily lives of the men and women living in an extremely degraded environment. The dust and the smell permeate everything. The children often arrive barefoot, their clothes dirty or torn. The most common diseases tell their own story: scabies, diarrhea, and malnutrition are almost constant.

We conducted a nutritional survey of one hundred children in the camp, and the results are alarming: more than half show signs of undernutrition—53%, one third of them severely malnourished and two thirds moderately. In concrete terms, this means that most of the children examined are not growing normally: their weight is insufficient for their height or age, which can lead to bone fragility, developmental delays, edema, and greater vulnerability to infections. These data confirm the seriousness of the situation and illustrate the lack of sustainable nutritional programs in the region.

Children of the Sahlat al Banat camp © Juliette Elie

Dangerous Budget Cuts for Relief Efforts

These figures are not an exception; they reflect a broader reality—the humanitarian deadlock in northeastern Syria. Since early 2025, budget restrictions decided by Washington have led to the suspension of many USAID-funded programs. In practice, numerous international NGOs have seen their funding cut by 40%, forcing them to reduce staff and scale down their projects in the region.

On the ground, the consequences are visible: many NGOs have withdrawn, projects have been halted, and staff remain in limbo. Local NGOs are trying to compensate for the absence of international actors, but they lack the logistical and financial means that previously gave strength to the humanitarian apparatus. This paradigm shift now highlights the responsibility of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which finds itself alone in front of camps it can neither manage nor close.

In this fragmented humanitarian landscape, Damascus is gradually regaining control, starting with the administrative level: from now on, all UN agencies must submit their project proposals to the Syrian government before any field action. At the same time, international NGOs wishing to collaborate with the United Nations must register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an obligatory step to obtain legal authorization to operate. This ministry imposes long, redundant, and sometimes arbitrary procedures.

Local NGOs, for their part, are subject to a similar process: they must obtain registration with the Ministry of Social Affairs, which reviews their statutes and funding sources. This supervision allows the government to filter and channel aid toward the areas it deems a priority.

Despite these constraints, the Health Authority Office (HAO)—the AANES’s health body—tries to maintain a parallel coordination system. Acting as a “Ministry of Health,” it manages hospitals, primary health centers, and coordinates humanitarian activities of both international and local NGOs to best respond to the population’s needs.

Beyond the humanitarian emergency, northeastern Syria has for several months been awaiting negotiations between the new government led by Ahmed Al Charaa and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. In early October, several meetings took place, driven by U.S. efforts to maintain a fragile balance between their Kurdish allies and a Syrian regime seeking regional normalization.

Like the Druze and Alawite communities, Kurdish representatives appear to be advocating for a federal modelguaranteeing administrative, cultural, and security autonomy. Damascus, on the other hand, favors the establishment of a centralized state and the integration of the various armed groups.

During my mission, clashes broke out in Aleppo’s Kurdish neighborhoods of Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud, opposing local units to pro-government factions. On October 8, a ceasefire was negotiated between the two parties, restoring a fragile calm to the city. These episodes reflect the fragility of coexistence between the regime and Kurdish forces and recall the community violence recently inflicted on the Druze and Alawites.

Even within Kurdish circles, opinions diverge. Some express cautious optimism, seeing a chance for recognition or even the promise of a federal state. Others, more disillusioned, fear renewed conflict, the disenchantment of a people exhausted by war. “Talks will never succeed as long as Damascus remains torn both internally and by its foreign sponsors,” says a local official in Qamishli.

Hope for Peace Above All

On the ground, this political stalemate is ever-present and translates into constant security fragility. Roads are closed or blocked by makeshift checkpoints; local partners tell rumors of attacks, kidnappings, and revenge killings—all of which contribute to the population’s sense of insecurity. The fear of the Islamic State still lingers in some villages where sporadic attacks occur.

Yet, we encountered no incidents during our mission. Movements took place without hindrance, and the region remains relatively stable. This observation reveals a fragile stability, where life continues despite everything.

Northeastern Syria today is a humanitarian gray zone, where neither war nor peace truly prevails. International attention has turned elsewhere, cameras have moved on, and displaced populations—now invisible—are rarely mentioned. Yet life here remains marked by extreme precariousness. In Raqqa, the national hospital still stands, supported almost entirely by NGOs. Care is provided free of charge, allowing the population to access a minimal level of healthcare.

Like many humanitarian actors in the region, we work exclusively with local NGOs—the only ones who truly know the realities on the ground. Mustapha, our country director, and Driss, our project manager, embody this quiet resistance and remain committed despite the uncertainty weighing on the current political situation.

I will return soon to continue this modest but essential work for those who have nothing left—except the hope of peace above all.

Juliette Elie.

 

Medical Consultations in Sahlat al Banat

Docteur Juliette ELIE : 

After earning a doctorate in medicine from Université Paris Diderot and a master’s degree in research on inflammation and inflammatory diseases, Dr. Juliette Elie works as an associate practitioner at Necker–Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris.

She currently serves as a volunteer humanitarian doctor within the NGO SOLINFO, chaired by Edouard Lagourgue, where she oversees medical projects, particularly in the fields of nutrition, community health, and support to displaced populations.

Her commitment reflects an approach that combines scientific rigor, field action, and support for local actors to sustainably strengthen health capacities in crisis zones

 

CALL TO READERS

Défis Humanitaires is launching a collective reflection on the changes in the world that justify the evolution of the magazine and its layout. Thank you for:

Thank you for your commitment and loyalty to Défis Humanitaires.

So here we are

So here we are. The world before us has collapsed. Humanitarians who see the world through its sufferings could feel it coming, even if the brutality of the shock allows us to be a little dazed. It is all the more violent because the system, already under great external pressure, is collapsing from within. The budget cuts announced by many European countries gave us the beginnings of what was to come.

All of a sudden, we’re left with nothing. For a long time, report after report, we have all known that the concentration of humanitarian funding in the budgets of a small handful of donors represented a danger. Many efforts have been made to diversify, with little result. Why is this?

Development cooperation and humanitarian aid are so ingrained in our systems – the rich help the poor – that we forget why they exist. It’s not really a question of morality. States do not fall within the realm of morality, and if your government spends your tax money to give it to people outside the national community without any obvious return, it is because it has an interest in doing so. When this interest is no longer perceived or perceptible, then there is a problem.

Source: Official Development Assistance (ODA), OECD

America’s ruthlessness should not obscure the fact that many donor countries have been announcing budget cuts for months. But no one is giving any more. Why should we give to countries whose governments, and sometimes whose populations, no longer want to hear from us? Why should humanitarian aid, which is counted in the budget as official development assistance and financed almost exclusively by the countries of the political West, be perceived as neutral? For a long time now, humanitarian neutrality has only been perceived by those who provide it.

With a clear political objective in mind, development aid was designed to enable the least economically advanced, newly independent countries to compensate for the lack of a tax base that would have enabled them to invest in their own physical and social infrastructure. Some countries, particularly in Asia, did this and integrated into the world economy, while others did not. Development cooperation then became a way of getting the least developed countries to converge towards a Western model, not only in economic terms, but also in political and societal terms. Democracy, human rights, gender equality and so on. Can there be economic development and a reduction in poverty outside this model? It would seem so, as surprising as it may seem to us.

Historically, humanitarian aid came from private or religious initiatives. Governments then took over. Since we can’t prevent or stop war, let’s repair its consequences as best we can. Humanitarian aid is as much a reflection of the bad political conscience of rich, democratic countries as it is of our collective good conscience. Funded almost exclusively by government budgets, it has become an industry with no economic competition or ideological adversaries, and therefore resistant to introspection and reform. The marker of success was the constant increase in budgets, and the increase in budgets led to a concomitant increase in the field of humanitarian aid. This cycle has been broken, what are the consequences?

In eastern Chad, the WFP distributes food to new arrivals from Sudan. Photo WFP/Jacques David

The countries of the ‘South’, now very sensitive to external signs of sovereignty, do not want aid, but investment, the only way to stay afloat and develop economically. They have much more choice than before, and are mixing and matching their partnerships according to their interests, sectors and offers. Imagine a country negotiating arms and education with one partner, roads with another, and technical assistance with yet another. Humanitarian aid is rarely negotiated, but it comes largely from the same donors and players.

The countries of the North, now very sensitive to their spending, do not want to help, but to invest, as the only way of maintaining their geopolitical and economic standing. The focus seems to be on the transition from aid to investment, with this summer’s Seville summit on financing for development as the high point of the forthcoming reforms. This means that the focus will be on countries with economic development potential, and that the others will be satisfied with humanitarian aid.

This is how the ‘global Gateway’ model has mapped out a path that is the only valid and politically audible one. The ‘differentiated approach’ to be applied to the most fragile contexts is far from being defined, and it is no coincidence that ECHO is nominally in charge of it, nor that the Commission has postponed the development of an integrated approach to fragility. It is not a priority.

Source : U.S. Foreign Assistance By Agency, ForeignAssistance.gov

So what are we changing?

Aid reform cannot really avoid thinking about why we want to help and how. This is no longer intangible, and the arguments of the twentieth century no longer hold water, either in the South or in the North. Even if humanitarian budgets are better protected from cuts, solidarity NGOs will have to rethink themselves in terms that are audible. Preservation of values or creation of added value? What is on offer? Perhaps this is what we need to redefine, beyond the ‘capacity to manage programmes in complicated areas’ that defines the humanitarian world. Human solidarity still exists, and should continue to exist. Whether this necessarily translates into programmes for the distribution of goods or services on behalf of donors is perhaps open to discussion.

Of course, it’s the closest communities that make the first effort, and sometimes the biggest. Because they are there on the spot, because they themselves have been affected by a disaster or conflict, they mobilise. This effort is not standardised, but it is often adapted. Local organisations exist, and they mobilise all the better because they are known and recognised in the affected communities before the shock. In this respect, ‘localising aid’ is one of the biggest sea snakes in humanitarian aid. But the concept is flawed. Localising aid’ implicitly means that aid is primarily international, but that local actors – often conceived solely in terms of local NGOs – need to be involved. But if international players are providing essential volumes of aid, who said that they alone were responsible for helping victims everywhere? What if our role was not so much to ‘localise’ aid as to support local efforts on their own terms? Because the capacity of local players is built up in the same way as that of international players: by the number of operational responses they have decided on, managed, financed and evaluated, and by the number of mistakes they have made.

This is undoubtedly where one of the changes lies. At the level of mentalities. We need to ask ourselves who on the ground has the capacity to act and how we can help these initiatives, technically and financially, making the most of our technical and logistical expertise, rather like the many very local development NGOs that were very active in the 1960s to 1980s, before the humanitarian steamroller drained all resources. It’s a different approach, based on partnership rather than immediate action, but perhaps one worth exploring. Could we do it?

 

Cyprien Fabre is head of the “crises and fragility” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian department, in 2003, and held several positions in crisis contexts. He joined the OECD in 2016 to analyze the engagement of DAC members in fragile or crisis countries. He has also written a series of “policy into action” and “Lives in crises” guides to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He is a graduate of Aix-Marseille Law School.

I invite you to read these interviews and articles published in the edition :