UN relief agency chief Martin Griffiths said Thursday the people of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso face violence, repeated displacement and difficulties finding sustainable livelihoods for themselves and their families. 

Nearly 15 million in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso face the same struggles which is 4 million more who are in need since last January, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that described it as an "extraordinary increase in only one year."

Griffiths said in 2022, the UN will need close to $2 billion for its humanitarian response in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

"The confluence of conflict, climate change, increasing political instability, lack of sustainable development opportunities, and poverty are driving millions into increasingly desperate conditions. COVID-19 and its economic impact has only made it all much worse," he told senior officials meeting on the humanitarian situation in the Central Sahel.

He said violent attacks went up eight-fold in the Central Sahel between 2015 and 202, with the number of fatalities increasing more than ten-fold.

"The result is more than two million people displaced including half a million internally displaced last year alone," he said.

More than 5,000 schools are closed or non-operational, jeopardizing the future of hundreds of thousands of children as many health centers are out of service.

The number of people facing severe food insecurity has tripled in Mali and doubled in Niger compared to November 2020 as more than 8 million are expected to be affected during the lean season, according to the UN.

The Central Sahel is one of the most dangerous places in the world for aid workers.

One-third of all abductions of aid workers in the world in 2020 occurred in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, according to Griffiths.

Griffiths visited Nigeria to scale up humanitarian activities in the region.

He is expected to visit Mali and Niger in the coming months to meet those who are affected./aa

Braving harsh winters, Syrian fathers stay awake at night to make sure their children do not to freeze to death in opposition-held Idlib.

Hundreds of tents in the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Idlib along the border between Turkiye and Syria were destroyed recently due to heavy snowfall and downpour.

The families living there scavenge for plastic and cardboard during the day so that they can light a bonfire at night to stay warm.

Yasir Barri, who was displaced from his hometown Hama due to incessant attacks by the Bashar al-Assad regime, said: "Right now we don't have a stove or anything to burn to heat the tent."

Living with a family of 12, including seven children, Barri said: "We burn old shoes and plastic we collect from the garbage to keep the children warm."

"If I could I would give them a piece of my heart to eat. But I can't. I can't find a job. We live on monthly aid," he added.

Huseyin Nasir, another resident at the camp, said he uses a gas cylinder for cooking and keeping the tent warm for his child, who stays wrapped in a blanket.

"I cannot work. My wife works in the fields for seven Turkish liras ($0.5) a day. All I want is a house and a stove to keep my son warm," said Nasir, who has poor eyesight.

Syria has been ravaged by a civil war since early 2011 when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protesters.

The Idlib de-escalation zone was forged under an agreement between Turkiye and Russia. The area has been the subject of multiple cease-fire agreements, which have been frequently violated by the Assad regime and its allies.

The situation for the people in Idlib worsened when the Assad regime, backed by Russia and Iran, launched an offensive on the province, causing large-scale displacement./aa

A special "charity train" carrying 750 tons of emergency goods under the coordination of Turkiye's government left for Afghanistan from the Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday.

The train, with aid from 11 humanitarian organizations coordinated by the state Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD), is bound for a journey of 4,168 kilometers (3,590 miles), according to Turkiye's Transport and Infrastructure Minister Adil Karaismailoglu.

"We have two trains with 47 wagons, carrying approximately 750 tons of charity goods," Karaismailoglu he said, adding that the train will reach Afghanistan after first passing through Iran and Turkmenistan.

Citing the start of an Islamabad-Tehran-Istanbul cargo train last December, he said the charity train will travel the corridor in 16 days.

For his part, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu stressed that 12.9 million children in Afghanistan are in need of aid due to extreme weather conditions.

Turkiye will always side with the people of Afghanistan, he said, adding: "For the past four years, we have been the country, the nation that has given the most aid in the world."

Aid agencies describe Afghanistan’s plight as one of the world’s most rapidly growing humanitarian crises.

According to UN humanitarian coordination office OCHA, half the population now faces acute hunger, over 9 million people have been displaced, and millions of children are out of school.

Previously, the UN and its partners launched a $4.4 billion funding appeal to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan in 2022.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has also warned that millions of Afghans are on the verge of death, urging the international community to release Afghanistan’s frozen assets and jump-start its banking system./aa

The Jordanian army said on Thursday that troops killed 27 drug smugglers trying to enter the country from neighboring Syria.

The operation, the largest of its kind since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, was carried out simultaneously at several points on the Jordan-Syria border, according to an army statement.

Jordanian forces thwarted several attempts to smuggle drugs from Syria, seizing large quantities of narcotics, it added.

The military said it applied the “newly established rules of engagement against smugglers who were supported by other armed groups.”

“At least 27 smugglers were killed and several more injured in the operations, while the rest of them fled back into Syria,” the army said.

Jordan has enhanced border vigilance and directed troops to toughen rules of engagement with smugglers due to an increasing number of such incidents over the past year.

Two Jordanian military personnel, including an officer, were killed in clashes with smugglers earlier this month./aa

A Turkish scientist and his team have made significant progress on a new treatment that is proving effective against all variants of the coronavirus.

Dr. Derya Unutmaz, a principal investigator at the Connecticut-based Jackson Laboratory, said his team set out with the question: How to develop an immune system that can be effective against all variants.

He said they used the technology of synthetic biology to improve the treatment.

Unutmaz and his team had successful results in laboratory work in programming cells, which is the synthetic biology part, and the next step will be testing animals, he said.

He noted that they adopted the method used in cancer treatment for cells infected by the coronavirus.

Unutmaz said COVID-19 variants can escape antibodies developed by the body, therefore, even people who are vaccinated might contract the virus, citing the omicron variant.

"There are protrusions that we call spike protein on the surface of the virus, these are the keys of the virus. Using these, the virus attaches to the lock on the surface of the cell and opens and enters it. After that, it produces its own proteins, copies and spreads it to other cells," he said.

"The method we developed is actually to trap the virus,” he said. “We took the lock on the surface of the cell and turned it into a molecule with synthetic biology."

Noting that no COVID-19 variant could escape the method his team developed, he said as the virus develops, it binds to the synthetic lock even better so the treatment his team advanced will be an effective method against variants that may arise in the future.

He said his team has received very positive feedback. “We are very happy to be able to develop such a method within this process”

Unutmaz underlined that the study is being contributed to by two immunologists, with one based in Turkiye, adding that biotechnology is developing in Turkiye and they might be able to do some of the work there in the future.

"We have gone through a very difficult process, it has been almost two years, we are all very tired, but people should not despair," he said about the future trajectory of COVID-19.

"I think a significant part of the pandemic will end with omicron," he said./aa

A new version of the coronavirus omicron strain detected in parts of Asia and Europe is spreading much faster than the original variant, a member of Turkiye’s Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board has warned.

The BA.2 sub-variant can cause a more rapid increase in number of infections as its transmission rate is higher than the BA.1 version, Dr. Alper Sener said in an interview with Anadolu Agency.

He said there was evidence that BA.2 has been gaining ground in countries such as India and Denmark over recent weeks.

“BA.2 is becoming the new dominant strain in many countries. It has already outpaced BA.1 in Denmark in the past 10 days,” Sener said.

However, the new omicron version has not yet been found in Turkiye, he added.

The World Health Organization recently wrote on its website that “the BA.2 descendent lineage, which differs from BA.1 in some of the mutations, including in the spike protein, is increasing in many countries.”

“Investigations into the characteristics of BA.2, including immune escape properties and virulence, should be prioritized independently (and comparatively) to BA.1,” the global health agency said.

Sener explained that BA.2 is detectable with PCR tests and has “not caused an increase in hospitalization and death rates so far.”

However, he pointed out that BA.2 could be more resistant to existing vaccines, adding that understanding its characteristics will help “accelerate ongoing scientific efforts to update COVID-19 vaccines.”/aa

An investigation had revealed 93 sites of “potential human burials” in a small area around a former residential school in British Columbia, according to Canadian media reports.

The sites were identified during a survey around the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School and nearby Onward Ranch, CBC News reported.

They were detected with “ground-penetrating radar, along with aerial and terrestrial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors,” according to Whitney Spearing, who led the probe team.

The investigation focused on carried out on 14 out of 470 hectares of land that have been identified as areas of interest, the report said.

According to Spearing, some of the sites “may be connected to a known historical cemetery, but 50 appear to have no association with it.”

The only way to confirm whether the findings are human burials would be through excavation, she added.

Willie Sellars, chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, described the “findings as part of a ‘reawakening’ for Indigenous people about the lingering traumas of the residential school system,” the CBC report added.​​​​​​​/aa

Poland started the construction of a wall on its border in a bid to block the entry of irregular migrants from Belarus.

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, the Polish Border Guard said the wall that will run along 186 kilometers (116 miles) of the border will be completed in June.

It said 50 tons of steel will be used in the construction of the 5.5-meter (18-foot) high wall.

The border, which will have 22 gates, will be equipped with surveillance and electronic systems.

In 2021, more than 8,000 people tried to enter the EU through the Belarus-EU border, up from only 150 the previous year.

Last month, the EU imposed a new round of sanctions against Belarus, targeting among others its national airline and tourism companies in response to the migration crisis at the bloc’s borders with the country.

Even though the number of irregular migrants decreased in recent weeks as a result of measures taken by Poland, including deploying additional troops and adopting stricter regulations for asylum seekers, some still attempt to cross the border despite harsh winter conditions.

According to the Polish Border Guard, more than 800 people attempted to cross the border since Jan. 1./aa