Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and his wife, Asma, tested positive for coronavirus after suffering from "mild symptoms", the Syrian Presidency said on Twitter on Monday.
The couple are in "good health and their condition is stable" and they will perform their duties from their residence while in quarantine, the presidency said.
Ongoing crisis
Less than a week before the 10-year anniversary of the war that created more than 5.6 million Syrian refugees and internally displaced six million people in the country, it is uncertain what lies ahead for Syria.
Prices for basic goods more than doubled in 2020 alone and about 60 per cent of the country's population suffer from a form of food insecurity, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent said on Thursday.
Al Hol refugee camp is home to 62,000 people, half of whom are children.
The population of the camp comprises about 60 nationalities.
Repatriations have stalled and many people are desperate to leave amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The camp is run by the Syrian Democratic Forces amd it became a hotbed for violence and extremism, analysts said.
But a reliable and lasting political solution is nowhere in sight.
The World Health Organisation says Syria has 15,981 confirmed cases of Covid-19 so far and 1,063 deaths have been reported. But with testing kits rare and expensive in regime-held areas, and scarcer still in the north-western regions, the numbers are believed to be higher.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Zayed Sustainability Prize
