By Ylenia Gostoli
Three weeks after US President Donald Trump’s order to freeze foreign aid, Syrians are already seeing medical clinics providing urgent assistance close, water distributions slow down, and bread distribution in many displacement camps grind to a halt.
After nearly 14 years of war, the UN estimates that 16.5 million people across Syria need some sort of aid.
While the December overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad is beginning to change the way aid works in the country, the need for widespread relief for those dealing with severe poverty, food insecurity, and mass internal displacement has been unrelenting.
Syria’s already troubled (and hugely underfunded) aid landscape has been plunged into further turmoil since late January when Trump issued sweeping orders to stop US-funded aid work, followed by a series of waivers that seemed to allow some programmes – specifically for “lifesaving” activities – to continue. Aid workers in Syria say a lack of clarity on what this means has translated into thousands of staff being let go and the end of some critical programmes.
The US is the largest donor to aid coordinated by the UN in Syria, contributing 25% of funding in 2024. But a significant amount of international aid funding is not part of this coordination structure, and funding streams can be difficult to untangle.
That’s just one of the reasons that it’s hard to tell exactly how many people across Syria this will affect. Another is the fact that so many aid workers – both Syrian and international – have been either laid off or suspended over the past few weeks.
“At one point we said, ‘Let’s collect data on how this is impacting people and programmes,’” Giovanni Sciolto, a representative of the Syria INGO Forum (SIRF), which represents more than 70 international NGOs working across Syria, told The New Humanitarian. But “there aren’t even people [still employed] to collect data on how bad it is”. he said.
Camps are “the canary in the coal mine”
There is no comprehensive data yet to prove how bad things are getting, but there are several early indications and predictions. For example, in northeast Syria alone, Sciolto said: “If you are looking at just people in camps, it is going to be 200,000 people without food and 500,000 without water.”
“There is one NGO that used to provide water seven days a week,” Sciolto added, speaking of the northwest. “Now they provide less water and only two days a week. Water provision is a lifesaving activity, but they can’t do it because the cash flow has stopped. If you take this and multiply it by the number and places and people that are funded by USAID, it’s a massive blow.”
According to the UN’s emergency aid coordination office, OCHA, the US aid freeze has disrupted the work of six NGOs in northwest Syria who work on providing clean water and sanitation services, impacting more than 430,000 people across 247 locations – 195 of them in Idlib province.
OCHA told The New Humanitarian that the cuts have also affected at least seven camps in northeast Syria, significantly disrupting food distribution, particularly in Menbij, al-Hasakah, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, and the eastern Aleppo countryside.
“Humanitarian partners are heavily reliant on US funding to provide around 90% of all humanitarian activities,” an OCHA spokesperson said, referring to the situation in northeast Syria.
According to several aid workers and officials involved in the response, it is Syria’s 7.4 million displaced people, particularly the estimated 2.3 million who live in formal and informal camps, who will bear the brunt of the initial impacts.
“We are looking at a massive scale of loss of support that cannot be met by other donors.”
In the northeast, the need for displaced people is growing and changing quickly. Ongoing fighting between Türkiye-backed groups and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continues to displace residents of the region, with 652,000 people newly displaced across the country since the military operation that led to al-Assad’s ouster.
“For people living in camps, it’s not just that they don’t have assistance,” Sciolto pointed out. “They have no houses, they are destroyed, they can’t go back. In the camps, there may soon be no water, food, or health services. People will need to pay for healthcare, not to mention the cost of fuel to get there.”
One senior aid official involved in the Syria response, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely and not jeopardise their work, told The New Humanitarian that clinics were dismantled and medical equipment removed from al-Hol and two other nearby camps last week – the first camp holds former members, supporters, and victims of the so-called Islamic State. People with no source of income will now have to pay for medical care themselves if they can afford to get to a hospital, they said, adding that bread distribution had stopped by 14 February across most of the northeast’s camps.
But the official warned that “the camps are just the canary in the coal mine”. They said the impact will soon spread to informal settlements, displaced communities, and the wider population. “We are looking at a massive scale of loss of support that cannot be met by other donors,” they said. “From a humanitarian perspective, this is catastrophic.”
Every international and Syrian aid group The New Humanitarian spoke to – mostly off the record as they weren’t authorised to speak to the media – listed projects that were stopping or about to stop, including food and voucher distributions, winter clothing for children, hygiene supplies, and water and sewage services in camps.
Confusion and chaos
Trump’s 20 January executive order mandated a 90-day pause in US foreign development assistance, pending a review of each funded programme.
What followed was a series of vague waivers and orders appearing to allow for “life-saving” assistance but providing no clear definition of the term, combined with a lack of clarity about who could actually provide permission to work.
This directive has left local and international organisations in limbo. Many aid groups said that even if they had been told that their work was covered under a waiver, their funding had stopped or they couldn’t continue to work without greater certainty that they would be paid in the future.
“It has not been clearly explained what activities we can proceed with or not. What would be considered lifesaving and what would not be considered as life-saving, this is still uncertain.”
Hivin Kako, director of partnerships at the Syrian NGO Bahar, which works in formal and informal camps in the northern cities of Afrin and Azaaz, said the organisation received about a quarter of its budget from USAID.
“We took the decision to stop the activities completely because even though we got a waiver, [our latest] payment was not processed,” she told The New Humanitarian from Damascus. “That puts us at risk, with a lack of liquidity.”
Kako warned that Bahar’s closure alone meant the end of water distribution to 68 mostly informal camps that house more than 59,000 people, food assistance for 1,500 families (nearly 10,000 people), and cash aid for 1,000 families, among other services. “In most of the [camps], we are the only organisation for the service we provide,” she added.
Another senior employee at a Syrian NGO based in Gaziantep – the base for many aid groups that work in the northwest – echoed similar concerns about unclear guidelines.
“It has not been clearly explained what activities we can proceed with or not,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject and the funds still at stake. “What would be considered lifesaving and what would not be considered as life-saving, this is still uncertain.”
Mustafa Alokoud, a member of the steering committee for the NGO Forum for Northwest Syria – a coalition of organisations that deliver aid there from across the Turkish border (although many have expanded their work since the front lines changed with the fall of al-Assad) – said that no matter what happens over the 90-day period, “we have a big problem with funding”.
A draft policy paper prepared by the forum and seen by The New Humanitarian warns that Syrian organisations with lower financial reserves and less ability to secure new funds “could face imminent closure”.
Every aid group, both international and Syrian, that The New Humanitarian spoke to, reported that job cuts had either started or were coming.
One senior humanitarian official who works at an international organisation in Syria, and who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorised to speak to the media, said they are still trying to figure out the scale of the job cuts.
“In addition to the freeze, organisations haven’t been paid for the activities they have already delivered, which means organisations are left vulnerable and are dipping into their reserves for activities which were legally contractually committed from the US government,” they said.
All of this has happened so fast that international and national NGOs are scrambling to find other donors to fill in, or are urgently asking existing donors for greater flexibility in using their funding. But it’s likely not going to be enough – or to come quickly enough – to avert serious consequences for many people.
Funding cuts can happen in every humanitarian crisis, but this is different.
“In a normal situation, you would know donors are pulling out and NGOs would have a heads-up and some time to figure out what to prioritise,” SIRF’s Sciolto said. “But there is no common sense here, there is no common sense about leaving people to die. One day to the next, it is another punch in the face.”
Alakoud of the NGO forum was worried that there wouldn’t be enough time to adapt the response before people really start losing out. “I don’t know how we can solve all these issues in a short period,” he said. “The situation is complicated and people need everything you can imagine.”
Additional reporting from London by Annie Slemrod. Edited by Andrew Gully.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
