It’s hard to imagine a more pressing threat than guns and bombs but Syrian families have fought to survive from an equally dangerous weapon: water cuts.
 

Water has been weaponised against nearly five million Syrians. Armed forces have shut off water at the source while bombs have destroyed pumping stations and damaged pipes. Humanitarian workers have risked their lives to keep water flowing.

As extreme violence last year trapped millions in the city of Aleppo, water cuts drove families to desperation. Children found water wherever they could, risking deadly waterborne diseases without access to the medicine that could help them recover.

Children in the besieged parts of Aleppo didn’t start school on time last September. Instead of thriving in class and playing games in their schoolyard, they were helplessly trapped by violence. Hiding in basements. Afraid to go outside. Too scared to sleep.

Parents who should have been walking their children to school were digging them out of rubble with their bare hands; desperately rushing them to hospitals.

Getting children in Aleppo back to school was urgent. They needed to learn, play and recover from the profound stress of violence. They needed a routine again; they needed to feel normal. UNICEF teams in Syria got children back to school as soon as possible by:

• reopening 23 primary schools and setting up ten prefabricated classrooms in the city so 6,500 children could back to learning;
• coordinating with education authorities on Curriculum B - a special learning programme to help kids catch up when they’ve missed out on school;
• distributing ‘schools in a box’ to 90,000 kids. For children who’ve fled their homes with nothing but the clothes they’re wearing, these packs of textbooks, stationery and school bags are a fresh start.

UNICEF makes sure more of the world’s children are educated than any other organisation. We use this expertise every day to turn the news around for Syrian children in the world’s deadliest war zone. UNICEF helped increase school enrolment by 8% last year despite the huge obstacles presented by ongoing violence. We trained 6,017 teachers to make sure no child is left behind in class. And we helped 12,000 in rural and besieged attend their high school exams and start writing a story for themselves.

Last year’s harsh winter brought new threats of hypothermia and serious respiratory infection to children already weakened by malnutrition and lack of health care.

Children huddled in cold warehouses in Aleppo; they shivered behind the thin walls of refugee tents in Jordan and Lebanon; they burnt whatever they could find - rubbish, their toys - just to survive another night.

When it seemed all the warmth in the world was fading, UNICEF helped change the news for children starting to lose hope.

In the midst of escalating violence in his city of Aleppo, 10-year-old Ahmed wandered into a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. That’s where UNICEF found him: orphaned, worried, exhausted and cold, burning what little firewood he could find to stay warm.
 

Surviving any crisis is hard. Syria’s crumbling healthcare system adds a new challenge for children and families: they can’t afford to get sick.

Children are forced to drink unsafe water and eat the little food their parents can afford. They dodge bullets, run from bombs and walk past unexploded weapons on the way to school. They take incredible risks just to survive each day but if they get sick or injured, there might be nowhere to go.

UNICEF does whatever it takes to reach children in danger. As hospitals continued to shut and health workers fled for safety in 2016, UNICEF:
 

• trained more than 6,300 doctors, nurses, midwives and other health specialists;
• worked with partners to rehabilitate more than 100 health centres and run 30 remote health teams who travelled to areas others couldn’t reach;
• screened a million children and mothers for malnutrition, treated those with the deadliest form of the disease and gave new mums breastfeeding advice.

There’s one news story that never made the headlines - because it was prevented.

After immunisation rates dropped from 95% to as low as 20% because of conflict, UNICEF helped to vaccinate more than 3.5 million children. That work meant that in the last two years, there’s been no reported cases of polio in Syria. An outbreak of polio here would be fast and disastrous for children but UNICEF is working tirelessly to prevent it ever happening.