Record 4.1 million in Syria receive food aid

A record 4.1 million people in Syria received food rations in August due to more convoys being able to cross front lines and borders from Turkey and Jordan, the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP) said on Tuesday.

“We are reaching more people every day with urgently needed food assistance - many of them have been going hungry for months,” Muhannad Hadi, WFP's regional emergency coordinator for the Syria crisis, said in a statement.

Over the last six weeks, WFP and partner agencies have crossed front lines to reach more than 580,000 people, over four times the 137,000 reached in the preceding six weeks, it said.

Earlier this week, United Nations officials warned that violence from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threatened to block cross-border humanitarian aid operations approved by the Security Council.

The U.N.’s deputy humanitarian chief, Kyung-wha Kang, told the council that both the extremists and the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front are advancing on border crossings with Turkey “and could hinder additional cross-border operations.”

More than three million Syrians have fled the civil war ravaging their country to become refugees, mounting to one million of them in the past year alone.

“The Syria crisis has become the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era, yet the world is failing to meet the needs of refugees and the countries hosting them,” the Associated Press quoted the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres as saying.