New Qatar-financed village opens for deplaced in Syria

More than 1,000 new homes for displaced people in northern Syria were inaugurated on Tuesday by Qatar's Red Crescent and Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, the Qatari organisation said.

Mohammad Salah Ibrahim of the Red Crescent said the Qatari-financed village of 1,136 new homes was "the largest village opened to date in northern Syria".

The homes are in 143 two-storey buildings in the village in Aleppo province, which Ibrahim said also has a 16-room health clinic, a school for 500 pupils, a mosque and shops.

More than half a million people have been killed and millions more displaced in Syria's civil war which began in 2011 with a crackdown on anti-government protests.

A deadly earthquake in February 2023 also killed about 6,000 people in the country, and 50,000 people in bordering southern Turkey.

Qatar has financed several building projects in northern Syria, and Turkey in May last year launched a project that includes the construction of 240,000 new homes at 13 sites in an effort to rehouse one third of the three million Syrians who had fled across the border.

Ammar Shehadeh, 37, had been living in a camp since fleeing Aleppo during the Syria conflict, and was one of those to get a new home.

He hoped above all that "health, education and other services would be available".

However, he also told AFP: "I hope our stay here will not be permanent."

Another displaced man, Abu Mohammad Najjar, also said his new apartment "will not replace either my home or the land I left behind in Aleppo".