U.S. pledges $300 million for humanitarian aid to victims of Syrian civil war

The United Nations requested $6.5 billion in aid for war-torn Syria. Photo by U.S. Government

Western and Arab nations pledged more than $2.4 billion dollars for 2014 humanitarian aid at a donor conference in Kuwait Wednesday for Syrians affected by the country’s civil war. The United Nations’ request for $6.5 billion in aid for Syria is the largest in the organization’s history.

The United States, the largest single international donor throughout the duration of the Syrian Civil War, announced its plans to donate $300 million to the United Nations to provide for food rations, drinking water, medicine and shelters for Syrians. Half of the new pledge will go to U.N. programs for victims in Syria, while the other half of new U.S. aid will go to Syria’s neighboring nations, including Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, to care for Syrian refugees. Since the war began in 2011, the U.S. has donated $1.7 billion in humanitarian aid to Syrians.

At the aid conference in Kuwait, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the humanitarian situation in Syria an outrage and rallied donor nations to draw attention to the Syrian refugee crisis.

“We are under no illusion that our job, or any of our jobs here, are just to write a check,” said Kerry in Kuwait , “The international community must use every tool at our disposal to draw the world’s attention to these offenses. They are not just offenses against conscience. They are also offenses against the laws of war.”

The U.S. wasn’t the most generous donor for 2014, however. That title belongs to Kuwait, a country that has thus far remained neutral throughout the Syrian Civil War. Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed, Kuwait’s ruling emir, pledged $500 million to the U.N. fund for humanitarian aid.

The European Union also pledged $225 million, Saudi Arabia and Qatar $60 million each and Iraq, which is facing its own insurgency in Anbar Province, pledged $13 million in aid.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon previously expressed regret that not all of the donations from the last aid meeting had been delivered to the U.N.’s fund — stating there was a 20 to 30 percent shortfall from what was promised to what donor nations delivered. The conference also comes on as shooting in a besieged district of Damascus to residents of the Syrian capital.

H/T Andy Swab