Beirut: Three small girls and an elderly man have died in Syria in the past 24 hours due to bitterly cold temperatures and a week-long storm, a monitoring group said Sunday.
“A girl less than two days old passed away (Sunday) in the southern Aleppo district of Firdous because of the extreme cold,” said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdul Rahman.
“An elderly man from the Maghayir district of Aleppo died as a result of the poor weather and because he had no heating,” said the Observatory.
Another small girl, aged just one, died in the southern Damascus district of Al Hajar Al Aswad on Saturday night, while the extreme cold also caused the death of a girl in Deir Al Asafir, a town east of the capital.
Since last Wednesday, six people have died across Syria as a result of freezing temperatures.
All the victims lived in areas under opposition control, where shortages of food, heating and medical equipment are rife.
In besieged Yarmuk of southern Damascus, a man died of “poor living conditions and a lack of medicines and necessary treatment”, said the Observatory.
Yarmuk has been under army siege for more than a year.
Some aid has been allowed to trickle in, but malnutrition and medical shortages have killed dozens of civilians trapped in the Yarmuk neighbourhood which is home to a Palestinian refugee camp.
In neighbouring Lebanon, at least three Syrian refugees died last Wednesday due to plunging temperatures and lack of heating.
On Saturday, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported four Bangladeshi workers suffocated as a result of faulty heating in their room in a mountainous region north of the country.
The four were found dead yesterday in the Dinniyeh region. The Middle East has been hit by a severe winter storm since Tuesday, affecting tens of thousands of Syrian refugees living in tents around the region.
Syria’s main Western-backed opposition group on Thursday appealed to the international community to help Syrian refugees and internally displaced people suffering amid the snow storm.
The wintry weather, which swooped across much of the Mideast on Tuesday, mostly silenced the guns in Syria and grounded government warplanes because of bad visibility.
