MOSCOW, October 1 (RIA Novosti) - Germany is going to send an additional $12.6 million in relief funds to Syria and Iraq amid a painful refugee crisis, Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said on Wednesday.
"[German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter] Steinmeier has made a decision to allocate another 10 million euros [$12.6 million] in refugee aid to Syria and northern Iraq," Schaefer told journalists in Berlin.
"Most of these funds will be transferred to international humanitarian organizations," he added.
Germany has donated a total of 600 million euros (about $756 million) to Syria and Iraq to support displaced people over the span of three years. According to the latest UN refugee agency's report, the first half of 2014 saw Germany field a particularly large number of asylum pleas from both countries.
Anti-government protests that erupted in Syria in March 2011 triggered an increasingly bloody civil war in the country that, according to UN recent estimates, has claimed the lives of more than 191,000 people over a three-year period. The civil war forced as many as three million more to flee their homes.
A new threat came from the Islamic State (IS), a Sunni militant group that controls vast territories in Syria and northern Iraq. Their radical take on Islam has already forced tens of thousands of Christians, Shias and Yazidis to flee their homes.
