Introduction
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established in 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. The agency is mandated to lead and coordinate international action to protect refugees and find solutions to refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. It strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country.
UNHCR started its operations in Syria with the first Iraqi war in the early nineties and expanded its operation exponentially with the massive influx of Iraqi refugees in the middle of the last decade. In 2012 in the context of the Syrian crisis, UNHCR expanded its operations to support the increasing number of internally displaced Syrians.
UNHCR receives facilitation from the Syrian Government through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirming the Government’s commitment to expand humanitarian space including to hard-to-reach areas.
Furthermore, approvals have been granted to bring food and Core Relief Items across the Iraq-Syria border. Procedures taken by the Syrian Government have been simplified to facilitate passage through checkpoints, to issue visas for international staff, and to establish UN hubs in different areas in the country in order to improve outreach to beneficiaries.
Nevertheless, UNHCR work has faced many challenges such as the difficulty in making new partnerships due to illegibility and incapacity of some partners, and fluidity of the security situation due to shifting lines of conflict causing repetitive displacement and thus making it difficult to locate and assist IDPs. Other challenges include the damage to essential services, lack of basic infrastructure, and difficulties in verifying the credibility of the information received. Furthermore, the operation in Syria has recently been rated to be an E class, non-family, hardship duty station due to the rise in mortar attacks, shelling, and kidnaping of UN staff.
In spite of all these challenges, UNHCR is still committed to achieving its objectives in Syria and helping vulnerable people all around the country through its operations, outlined later in the report.
N.B: As the statistics in the report are being produced right at the beginning of the year many of them are subject to verification and may change later on. The statistics provided are either final or based on realistic estimates of figures for the end of 2013.