U.N. Ambassador Angelina Jolie Visits Syrian Refugees in Jordan
Hoping her celebrity will bring attention to the widening Syrian refugee crisis, actress and U.N. envoy Angelina Jolie spoke of the horrors that children, many of them orphans, have witnessed in Syria.
“Body parts separated, and burned people being pulled apart like chicken — a little 9-year-old girl said that,” Jolie said during her visit to a refugee tent camp in Jordan near the Syrian border.
Every day, an estimated 2,000 Syrians are fleeing the relentless bloodshed that has gripped their country for the past 18 months, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Tuesday. That adds up to more than a quarter million Syrian refugees — 253,000 — now living in camps and other temporary homes inside Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Life in the dusty Zaatari refugee camp outside Mafraq, Jordan, is not easy for those living there, many of whom have almost nothing after leaving their homes amid violence. Members of one family told CNN they had fled over the border with a 4-day-old baby and the clothes on their backs. Others complained of being short of food and water.