Three weeks after US President Donald Trump's order to freeze foreign aid, Syrians are already seeing medical clinics providing urgent assistance close, water distributions slow down, and bread distribution in many displacement camps grind to a halt. After nearly 14 years of war, the UN estimates that 16.5 million people across Syria need some sort of aid. While the December overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad is beginning to change the way aid works in the country, the need for widespread relief for those dealing with severe poverty, food insecurity, and mass internal displacement has been unrelenting.

Syria's already troubled (and hugely underfunded) aid landscape has been plunged into further turmoil since late January, when Trump issued sweeping orders to stop US-funded aid work, followed by a series of waivers that seemed to allow some program—specifically for "lifesaving" activities—to continue. Aid workers in Syria say a lack of clarity on what this means has translated into thousands of staff being let go and the end of some critical programs.

The US is the largest donor to aid coordinated by the UN in Syria, contributing 25% of funding in 2024. But a significant amount of international aid funding is not part of this coordination structure, and funding streams can be difficult to untangle.

That's just one of the reasons that it's hard to tell exactly how many people across Syria these changes will affect. Another is the fact that so many aid workers—both Syrian and international—have been either laid off or suspended over the past few weeks.

According to the UN's emergency aid coordination office, OCHA, the US aid freeze has disrupted the work of six NGOs in northwest Syria who work on providing clean water and sanitation services, impacting more than 430,000 people across 247 locations—195 of them in northwestern Idlib province.

In the northeast, needs for displaced people are growing and changing quickly. Ongoing fighting between Türkiye-backed groups and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continue to displace residents of the region, with 652,000 people newly displaced across the country since the military operation that led to al-Assad's ouster.

— Ylenia Gostoli for The New Humanitarian, Feb. 17 (condensed; some internal links added)