The European Union has been a leading donor for providing humanitarian assistance both inside Syria and in the region, focused on addressing life-saving and life-sustaining needs. The assistance, coordinated by the Commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO), is delivered through humanitarian partners, including international NGOs, UN agencies, the ICRC and their local implementing partners. They provide the most vulnerable with health care, food assistance, water, sanitation and hygiene services, protection, shelter, education and livelihoods support. This includes cross line operations and cross border from Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.
As everywhere else in the world, ECHO Syria operates with great autonomy, based solely on humanitarian principles of independent, impartial, neutral and needs-based assistance. The ECHO Syria Country Office in Beirut, as well as ECHO offices in Damascus, Erbil and Gaziantep, allow the EU to monitor and scale-up humanitarian aid operations inside Syria and to engage directly with humanitarian partners on the ground.
The EU also provides significant support to refugees and their host communities in the countries neighbouring Syria, namely Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkiye, as well as Iraq and Egypt. The EU maintains that, for now, conditions are not in place for the return of refugees and internally displaced persons in a safe, informed, dignified and voluntary way.
