The month of Ramadan is almost done with its first week, as Muslims all around the world observe this month.
Islam asks of Muslims to fast from dusk till dawn, refraining from eating and drinking as long as the sun is up. This is a Muslim practice intended to highlight and be familiar with the suffering of those in extreme poverty that end up going to sleep with a growling empty stomach.
Fasting the month of Ramadan, for some, is not only a form of worship, but also an enforced way of life. Among these people are the Syrians living under siege.
Many of them who have endured years of siege live a year-round Ramadan rather than just for one month. Some areas in Syria have been under siege for 4 to 5 years without allowing any food or medicine in or out, leaving the citizens to adjust to living on minimum nutrition until they resort to eating grass.
The Assad regime along with its allied Hezbollah militia have attempted to deliberately separate some opposition-held regions and isolate them from the outside world as a form of intimidation to other regions that have the intention of opposing the Assad regime.
The first harbingers of siege was when Assad regime placed military and security checkpoints at the entrances of the cities that went against its tyrannical authority. One of the main targets of these barriers was to prevent the entry of medical supplies and food, causing a dire loss in food and medical materials.
Daraa was the first to be strangled by Assad terrorists in 2011, followed by Baniyas city, then Moadamiyat al-Sham and Douma in Damascus countryside, then Hama and followed by Homs.
The sieges continued until November 2012 when Iranian-backed Hezbollah surfaced and encircled these areas entirely, adding new areas; south of Damascus, al-Houla, al-Rastan and Talbeesah in Homs countryside.
The besieged areas became large prisons where the Assad regime used starvation as a step to break the will of its people.
Around 486,700 people–among them women, children and elderly–are currently living in Syria under siege, more than half of them are surrounded by Assad terrorists and their Shia allies, out of 4.6 million people live in areas “hard to reach,” according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the United Nations earlier this year.
In addition, according to two non-governmental organizations which are PAX and Syria Institute, more than a million people are suffering from “a growing risk of death” because of the shortage of food, electricity and water in 46 towns under siege.
Despite the recent February agreement to increase humanitarian access to besieged areas of Syria, hundreds of thousands of families are still without aid. According to Save the Children, only 17% of the more than 4.5 million people in besieged and hard-to-reach areas have so far received assistance, and the Assad regime continues to deny permission for the entry of UN aid convoys.
The humanitarian situation in these Assad-besieged areas is dire as the UN continues to fail in bringing aid to the people inside causing half a million Syrians to fast for way too long.
