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The Daily Tar Heel

Opinion: We should do all we can to ease Syrian suffering

In life, UNC’s Deah Shaddy Barakat was working to provide dental care to the victims of Syria’s civil war. The United States should emulate him by increasing humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees and financial aid to the countries that host them.

Aid to refugees and to Syria’s neighbors will reduce tensions that arise between Syrians and their host communities and help stabilize a volatile region crucial to American interests. The civil war between President Bashar Assad and those seeking to depose him has resulted in over 190,000 deaths, sent 6.5 million Syrians into internal exile and forced an additional three million to flee to neighboring countries, notably Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.

More than a quarter of residents in Lebanon are Syrian refugees.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States has provided $1.4 billion to help ameliorate the refugee crisis. These funds, though helpful, are inadequate.

Humanitarian assistance will not solve Syria’s refugee crisis but will only soften its cruel edges. But given America’s contradictory desires to maintain a Syrian state, depose Assad and defeat the Islamic State, the United States is unlikely to provide the kind of military support or diplomatic heft needed to force a political solution ending the war.

Ordinary Syrians will keep dying and fleeing at a horrific rate. Deah did what little he could to ease their lot and so should we.

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