Qatar Charity (QC), in co-operation with Humanitarian Relief Foundation in Britain, has implemented a relief project for Syrian refugees in Greece.
The project included offering the necessary supplies required by the refugees such as food, shelter, clothes, shoes and covers, according to a statement from QC.
“Hundreds of thousands of refugees sought shelter on the Greek islands; however, the government could not take in such huge numbers and provide them with their needs, especially because Greece has been suffering from an economic crisis for a long time. All of these reasons combined made it necessary and important for QC to implement this project,” the statement noted.
For 60 days, the food aid included daily distribution of 350 cooked meals to three hotels where a number of refugees stayed. Around 21,000 people benefited from the project, which was implemented at around QR1,000,000 from
September until December 2015.
In order to meet the need for shelter, QC co-operated with other humanitarian institutions and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in order to check the refugees into a number of hotels on Cos island. Around 1,200 families (approximately 6,000 people) and 7,000 single people were given rooms at the hotels.
In co-operation with multiple health institutions, QC buried a number of corpses at a cemetery for Muslims on the island. QC had received a relief plea from some institutions and an imam of a mosque there.
The plea explained how there were multiple corpses of refugees who died while crossing the sea. Their corpses were kept at the hospital’s morgue for a long time because the municipality did not have allocated money for that purpose. As a result, QC buried the 49 corpses.
Further, QC adopted a number of refugees who were detained because their documents were either unclear or destroyed. QC adopted seven cases who were later released. It also provided 204 tickets to a number of families who could not afford
travelling to Athens.
Mohamed Rashid al-Ka’bi, director of relief management at QC, thanked the philanthropists and donors from Qatar for financing such projects, which help protect Syrian refugees in Europe from sleeping in the open or on the streets.
The sum of money QC has allocated for displaced Syrians and refugees has reached around QR376,000,000. More than 6,831,000 people have benefited from the relief projects implemented in Syria and neighbouring asylum countries. The areas covered by the projects are food, shelter, health and education, 67% of which have been
implemented inside Syria.