UN: Syria's humanitarian crisis is dramatic beyond description

The United Nations official responsible for aiding Syrian refugees painted his bleakest picture to date Tuesday, describing a humanitarian crisis that is "dramatic beyond description" and a country and people so destroyed that they could take years to recover under the best of circumstances, The Washington Post reported. In addition to 3.6 million people internally displaced by Syria s civil war, registered refugees in the four neighboring countries now total 1.1 million, compared with just 33,000 last April, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in congressional testimony. At least half a million more who have fled Syria are unregistered, he said. By the end of this year, Guterres said, his organization expects 1 million refugees each in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, a situation that will have "an unimaginable impact on the economy, the society and the security of these countries." Guterres s remarks came on a day when signs of restlessness surfaced in Washington over the two-year-old stalemate in Syria s civil war, which has killed more than 70,000 people. Influential senators suggested a possible no-fly zone in northern Syria and proposed stepped-up U.S. training for rebel forces. Guterres said that, despite significant international aid both promised and delivered, the money is far short of what s needed. "UNHCR and its partners have received less than 30 percent of the funding we need to assist the current number of refugees, let alone those who are yet to come," he said. "There is no way a gap of this magnitude can be filled with existing humanitarian budgets." State Department officials presented a similar portrait at the hearing, held by a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The United States has contributed $385 million in humanitarian aid to Syria and about $110 million in nonlethal support to opposition groups.