GENEVA — The United Nations appealed on Wednesday for $1.5 billion in new aid to handle the steadily worsening humanitarian crisis created by spiraling violence in Syria and predicted that the number of refugees fleeing the conflict would double to more than 1 million in the next six months.
The increased estimate was least the fourth time the United Nations had revised its projections upward on refugees in the nearly two-year-old uprising against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, which has turned into a civil war that has left at least 40,000 people dead and has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.
The revised figures came as Syrian antigovernment activists and state media in Syria reported new mayhem convulsing the capital, Damascus, and other areas, and as Lebanese officials reported that Syria’s interior minister, Mohamed al-Shaar, was in Beirut for emergency medical treatment of injuries suffered in a Dec. 12 bomb attack by insurgents in Damascus. There was no confirmation from the Syrian government, which had denied earlier reports that Mr. Shaar had been wounded in that attack.
Meeting representatives of donor governments here in Geneva, United Nations agencies said they were seeking $1 billion to assist Syrian refugees in five neighboring countries and a further $519 million to provide emergency aid to four million people inside Syria over the same period — roughly 20 percent of the country’s population.
The Syrian crisis was also a dominant theme of a year-end news conference at the United Nations by Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, who said that he planned to convene a donor conference next year to raise additional aid money. Mr. Ban also thanked all the neighboring countries in the region that had absorbed Syrian refugees and he called upon Israel publicly for the first time to accept them as well. There was no immediate comment from Israel, which remains in a technical state of war with Syria.
Mr. Ban reiterated his plea for an end to the violence in Syria and said “we’re doing our best to provide necessary humanitarian assistance. We are raising our voices, appealing to the international community.”
Panos Moumtzis, the United Nations regional coordinator for Syrian refugees, said in a statement from Geneva that the enormity of the crisis “requires urgent support from governments, businesses and private individuals. Unless these funds come quickly we will not be able to fully respond to the lifesaving needs of civilians who flee Syria every hour of the day — many in a truly desperate condition.”
More than 525,000 Syrians have now registered as refugees, the United Nations refugee agency reported, roughly double the number it had recorded in early September. These include approximately 160,000 in Lebanon, 150,000 in Jordan, 140,000 in Turkey and more than 65,000 in Iraq. The agency also included Egypt for the first time as a sanctuary for fleeing Syrians, reporting more than 10,000 had registered there.
The refugee agency now expects the number to double again within the next six months, Mr. Moumtzis said.
He based that forecast on present trends in the conflict, with 2,000 to 3,000 Syrians crossing into neighboring countries every day. Under a worst-case outcome, in which the conflict results in a massive exodus of civilians, the number of refugees could rise to 1.85 million, he said.
As it is, “the violence in Syria is raging across the country, there are nearly no more safe areas where people can flee,” Radhouane Nouicer, the coordinator of United Nations humanitarian aid based in Damascus, told journalists in Geneva, citing daily shelling and bombings in the suburbs of the capital.
The needs of Syria’s increasingly desperate population, facing winter cold and shortages of basics like food, were much greater than the aid sought by the United Nations, Mr. Nouicer said, but the appeal was “realistic assessment of what we can achieve” in the complex and dangerous conditions prevailing in the country.
Among the immediate concerns is the fate of around half a million Palestinian refugees in Syria, a legacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict, mostly living in Damascus. An aerial assault by Syrian forces on Sunday against Yarmouk, a vast Palestinian neighborhood in the south of the capital that had been home to about 450,000 people, had caused many to flee. More than 2,200 crossed into Lebanon, according to a Lebanese security official, while others sought protection with relatives living elsewhere in Syria. But the whereabouts of many Yarmouk inhabitants as of Wednesday was unclear.
“We don’t know where they are, it’s a humanitarian crisis that still playing itself out,” said Martha Myers, director of relief and social services for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which administers aid to Palestinian refugees.
In Syria, the state-run SANA news agency reported that military forces had attacked insurgent positions in and around Damascus, Idlib, Hama and Dara, and had seized weapons and “eliminated a number of terrorists,” the government’s generic term for Mr. Assad’s armed opponents.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with a network of contacts in Syria, said much of the fighting on Wednesday was in districts adjoining the Yarmouk neighborhood, which insurgents have sought to occupy as part of their stated intention to seize control of the central part of the capital.
The observatory also reported that at least 11 people, most of them rebel fighters, had been killed in a car bombing in the contested northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
U.N. Seeks New Aid for Syria Crisis and Predicts 1 Million Refugees by Mid-2013
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U.N. Seeks New Aid for Syria Crisis and Predicts 1 Million Refugees by Mid-2013
