If you would like to help the Syrian people in these hugely difficult times, there are various ways you can do so:

Support The Syria Campaign. This is an organisation that has proved very effective in lobbying over issues related to Syria: for example supporting an EU embargo on sale of aviation fuel to Syria; pressing for funding of aid for Syrian  refugees, and for admission of Syrian asylum seekers to European countries.

It also raises support for civil initiatives inside Syria like the White Helmets.

Support humanitarian NGO’s which channel aid directly to needy communities in Syria (most UN aid is delivered in association with the regime). These include:

• Syria Relief – they work with surgeon David Nott whose efforts in providing medical care in the war zones has recently been featured by Channel 4 and the BBC.
• Hand in Hand for Syria
• Edinburgh Direct Aid
• Watanili – a project that provides educational and recreational activities for children in liberated areas and refugee camps.

Watanili’s ‘Cinema on the Go’ visits Aleppo

LONDON
Saturday 20th December, 6 to 8:00 pm in Trafalgar Square.
Facebook event page.

MANCHESTER
Saturday 20th December, 5 to 6:00 pm in Piccadilly Gardens.
Facebook event page.

ONLINE VIGIL
Light a candle, post a photo, tag it #SyriasForgottenCities.
Details here.

This Christmas Syria’s people need your support and solidarity. This will be the fourth Christmas since the mass uprising against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad began. Over the past three years brutal repression and mass killings by this regime have driven almost half the population of the country from their homes: 2.5 million have been turned into refugees while another 6.5 million are internally displaced, their houses shattered in a systematic campaign of bombing and shelling which has reduced whole cities to rubble.

Still Syrians resist both the regime and the terrifying gangsters of ISIS who have grown in the shadow of the regime’s violence. These people, the inhabitants of Syria’s forgotten towns and cities, need your solidarity.

This vigil is an opportunity for people across Britain to demonstrate their support for the Syrian people, and to pay their respect to those who have lost their lives in this great struggle for dignity and freedom.

We invite solidarity, peace, and human rights activists around the country to join us in a “Syria’s Forgotten Cities” campaign: to organise vigils and rallies, to inform people of the realities of Syrians’ ongoing struggles, and to encourage support for their cause.

Press release PDF.