Our commitment to the people affected by the conflict in the Kurdish-majority region of Syria continues. Distribution of medicines and health kits, psycho-social support and resilience at the centre of the next seven months of work.
On the morning of 28 September 2016, we again crossed the border into Iraq and entered Syria to accompany a load of humanitarian aid destined for the population under siege: general medicines, anti-tumour drugs that cannot be found in the country and hygiene kits for people housed in refugee camps. The shipment will be delivered by the Kurdish Red Crescent. The distributions will provide assistance to more than 20,000 people living in the Rojava region.
This is the first in a cycle of distributions that we will carry out between 2016 and 2017 as part of a project financed by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI), and which we will implement with the support of the Waldensian Board's Otto per Mille Office and the Autonomous Province of Bolzano.
In total, aid will be distributed for 50,000 displaced people and access to care guaranteed for 75,000.
But in Rojava we will be engaged in a broader project. Over the next seven months, internally displaced persons, Syrian and Iraqi refugees will also be able to rely on the psycho-social support services that we will provide in the KRC Centres, where we will conduct training in resilience techniques and psycho-social support for 200 Red Crescent workers.
2015 had seen us involved in the distribution of 2 humanitarian shipments to Rojava and a third shipment of tents and winter equipment. Today we are back on that 'bridge', attempting to break the Syrian siege across a small border point to Iraqi Kurdistan, where we have been working for over 25 years. Today, what we learnt there we also want to take to Rojava.
