The Danish Refugee Council has established a community centre in Dara’a, where a significant number of Iraqi refugees have found temporary settlement. The centre will be opened on a ceremony May 13 attended by the governor of Dara’a and the Danish ambassador.

The ceremony will mark the second step in a plan to expand the response of the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) to Iraqi refugees residing outside Damascus and support the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) in the assistance it provides to refugees and Syrian vulnerable families in areas far from the capital city where the international aid remains concentrated.

DRC has been providing educational, vocational training and community services support to Iraqi refugees in Damascus since early 2008. Those services have, since late 2009, been expanded to the countryside cities of Homs and Dara’a.

“A proportion of vulnerable Iraqis have left Damascus where living cost is not affordable to settle in cities where humanitarian aid is unfortunately less accessible. Therefore, DRC and the SARC have established a centre where refugees and their hosts are offered a wide range of services going from social/psychosocial counselling to languages/skills development courses or tutorial program for school-aged children which help them cope with displacement issues and maintain/develop social links with the local communities” says Olivier Beucher, Country Director of DRC - Syria.

The project started in early 2010 and has been funded by the Danish Government (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). It has been implemented in close partnership with the SARC Damascus HQ and their Dara’a branch with whom the works were jointly implemented and monitored. Therefore the opening ceremony will be attended by the Danish ambassador (Mrs. Christina MARKUS LASSEN) and the governor of Dara’a (Dr. FAISAL KALTHOM).

“Our local counterpart, the SARC, has made its resources available for the benefit of the project and together we develop a centre which aims at bringing additional capacity to SARC for assisting refugees and vulnerable Syrian families” says Olivier Beucher.

The Danish Refugee Council is one of the first international NGOs who have obtained permission to operate in Syria and has developed an assistance program in partnership with the Danish government, UNHCR, UNICEF, SIDA, SDC, the Ministry of Education and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. DRC’s objective is to ensure effective protection and humanitarian assistance to Iraqi refugees in Syria.

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