The UN on Tuesday sent 20 more truckloads of humanitarian aid to Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

The trucks crossed into Idlib through the Cilvegozu border gate in Turkey’s southern Hatay province.

The humanitarian aid will be distributed among the needy people in Idlib and its surrounding areas.

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

According to UN estimates, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced.

Idlib falls within a de-escalation zone forged under an agreement between Turkey and Russia.

The area has been the subject of multiple cease-fire understandings that the Assad regime and its allies have frequently violated./agencies

Kuwait is one of the first countries to sign a MoU with China on the Belt and Road Initiative

Kuwaiti Consul General in Shanghai Mishal Al-Shamali stressed on Monday Kuwait's keenness in developing bilateral ties with China in various fields to ensure real strategic partnership.

In a statement to KUNA, on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Kuwait and China, Al-Shamali said that there is a desire between the two friendly countries and at all levels to move forward in promoting various areas of cooperation.

Climate change-caused drought in Somalia has left 70% of families in the country without access to safe drinking water and in urgent need of humanitarian support, according to the non-profit organization Save the Children.

“Thousands of children are now reliant on emergency water trucking and unprotected wells or are forced to leave their homes in search of water,” it said in its latest report.

Reduced rainfall and severe water shortages are also killing livestock, causing crop failures and diminishing household incomes, leaving children in these families with fewer daily meals and less nutritious food, the report warned.

The loss of livestock also further exposes children in Somalia to the risk of malnutrition as they have less access to milk, Save the Children said.

“As the negative impacts of climate change intensify, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events in Somalia are increasing. In the past year alone, Somalia experienced severe floods, the most powerful cyclone to ever hit the country and now a looming drought. Communities are struggling to survive as they have no time to recover before the next crisis hits,” it said.

The report stressed that without immediate humanitarian aid, the crisis in Somalia is likely to peak in June, with the number of children and adults in urgent need of humanitarian support soaring to 5.9 million.

"The international community has been very generous in supporting people in Somalia. However, to reduce support now would be disastrous, as the deadly combination of continuous climate shocks, COVID-19 and conflict are pushing children and their families to the limit and they need urgent support to help them survive," it warned./aa

The foreign ministers of Canada and the UK and the US Secretary of State released a joint statement Monday expressing concern over the Chinese government’s “human rights violations and abuses” in its Xinjiang region against Uyghur Muslims. 

“The evidence, including from the Chinese government’s own documents, satellite imagery and eyewitness testimony, is overwhelming.

“China’s extensive program of repression includes severe restrictions on religious freedoms, the use of forced labour, mass detention in internment camps, forced sterilisations, and the concerted destruction of Uyghur heritage,” said the statement issued by Canadian Foreign Minister Marc Garneau, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Mentioning that they “have taken coordinated action on measures, in parallel to measures by the EU,” the three top diplomats said they want to clarify what they think about the “human rights violations and abuses.”

“We underline the importance of transparency and accountability and call on China to grant the international community, including independent investigators from the United Nations, journalists and foreign diplomats, unhindered access to Xinjiang,” they said.

“We will continue to stand together to shine a spotlight on China’s human rights violations. We stand united and call for justice for those suffering in Xinjiang.”

The Xinjiang region is home to around 10 million Uyghurs. The Turkic Muslim group, which makes up around 45% of Xinjiang’s population, has long accused China's authorities of cultural, religious and economic discrimination.

Up to 1 million people, or about 7% of the Muslim population in Xinjiang, have been incarcerated in an expanding network of "political re-education" camps, according to US officials and UN experts./aa

Violence has triggered massive and under-reported displacement in Cameroon, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). 

In a statement Monday, the IDMC said that historically, most displacement has occurred in the Far North Region, the poorest region of the country and the one that suffers the most from the insurgency by the Boko Haram terrorist group.

In 2020, however, seven in 10 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Cameroon were forced to flee because of violence in the country's Northwest and Southwest English-speaking regions.

"Since 2017, UN agencies have been warning of a tragedy in the making in the Northwest and Southwest regions," said IDMC director Alexandra Bilak.

"Reports of thousands of new displacements since the beginning of the year and school attacks that have left children dead show that this is now a reality."

The Central African country has been marred by protests and violence since late 2016, with residents in English-speaking regions saying they have been marginalized for decades by the central government and the French-speaking majority.

They are calling for independence or a return to a federal state.

Violence in the Anglophone regions has claimed an estimated 3,000 lives and caused the displacement of over 730,000 civilians, according to Human Rights Watch.

Last year, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said that for a second year running, Cameroon topped the list as the most neglected crisis on the planet in 2019.

“Many IDPs look for a safe haven in Cameroon's largest cities. But there they face a new set of challenges in accessing services and employment and often end up displaced again as a result of disasters,” said Bilak.

In August 2020, the worst coastal flooding in decades rendered nearly 5,000 people homeless in Douala, Cameroon's economic capital.

The IDMC said that last year, floods also swept through the semi-arid Far North Region, where they forced people already displaced from conflict areas to move again./agencies