Shaykh al Hadid, Syria, March 22 (AFP\/APP):Umm Esmat, a mother living in war-torn Syria, is preparing for the onset of Ramadan this year with a heavy heart, after a deadly earthquake forced her from her home.<\/p>\n
Now displaced in the rebel-held countryside of northern Syria, she places on the bare ground of her shelter a few bags of bulgur, dates, rice and sweets for breaking the fast during the Muslim holy month which begins on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“Ramadan this year will not be like the year before, or the year before that,” she said with a sigh, sitting in a desolate tent near her house, furnished only with mattresses and a heater.<\/p>\n
The walls of her home either collapsed or cracked in the powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck on February 6, killing nearly 6,000 people in Syria and tens of thousands more in neighbouring Turkey.<\/p>\n
The disaster heaped more misery on the people of northwestern Syria who have been battered by 12 years of war.<\/p>\n
The conflict, which erupted in 2011 with the brutal repression of peaceful protests, cost the lives of more than 500,000 people and uprooted around half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.<\/p>\n
At a nearby camp in the heavily quake-damaged town of Jindayris, Hilal Safarjali sells chocolate bars, biscuits and sweets from a makeshift stall to get by after he lost his home.<\/p>\n
“I cannot say happy Ramadan. We are not OK after the earthquake,” said the man in his 50s, displaced from Damascus.<\/p>\n
The United Nations warned last week that Syria faced “unprecedented levels of poverty and food insecurity”.<\/p>\n
Yet funding gaps could force the World Food Programme to stop providing assistance to nearly four million Syrians by summer unless more donations come in, the UN agency has said.<\/p>\n
Safarjali’s neighbour Umm Jumaa said she was still mourning her husband who was killed in the tremor.<\/p>\n
“This Ramadan without my husband will be very difficult,” she said with tears in her eyes.<\/p>\n
“We lost him, and he was the head of the household.”<\/p>\n
The daytime fasting month of Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam.<\/p>\n
Observant Muslims refrain from eating and drinking from dawn to dusk. They traditionally gather with family and friends to break their fast in the evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shaykh al Hadid, Syria, March 22 (AFP\/APP):Umm Esmat, a mother living in war-torn Syria, is preparing for the onset of Ramadan this year with a heavy heart, after a deadly earthquake forced her from her home. Now displaced in the rebel-held countryside of northern Syria, […]<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73030,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-news"],"yoast_head":"\n