The annual list of the “Top Ten Humanitarian Crises” around the world was recently released by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

MSF provides aid to troubled regions of the world including Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and others in its list of countries that are in dire need of humanitarian aid.

Since leaving Iraq in 2004 due to the danger to humanitarian workers, MSF has slowly started to return to the war-torn country in 2008. It has set up surgical programs in neighboring Jordan as well as supported local hospitals throughout the country in an attempt to help the 4 million refugees displaced by the war.

“I don’t want to go back to Iraq,” said an 18-year-old by the name of Said to MSF after he received facial reconstruction surgery in Jordan. “I’ve lost count of the number of friends who’ve died right before my eyes.”

The report added that thousands of Iraqis still have little-to-no medical care and many are “living under the threat of violence.”

In the Congo, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced with “little or no access to health care, food, water or basic shelter,” due to fighting in the eastern part of the country, the report said.

“Year after year, everyone waits and waits to see if the latest round of violence will bring a period of calm that will last long enough for them to resume a normal life,” said MSF coordinator Andre Heller. “Year after year people are disappointed.”

Meanwhile, the “appalling” situation in Somalia has deteriorated so much that MSF had to withdraw its international staff members after three colleagues were killed early last year.

MSF currently relies on their Somali colleagues to address basic needs of the roughly 1 million refugees who’ve been displaced since December 2006, when fighting broke out between a variety of insurgent groups and the Ethiopian government.

Hundreds of thousands of people still have no access to aid in Sudan — the site of the largest humanitarian aid operation in the world — where the crisis in Darfur and decades of civil war in the South offer “no end in sight to violence and suffering.”

“The media attention and political involvement in Darfur means that everyone knows about the conflict here,” said the head of MSF in South Darfur, Banu Altunbas. “But in the last four years, the situation has not improved. In fact, for most people, things are worse. ... People are living in fear. Every day is a question mark for survival.”

Unmet health needs in Burma, a health crisis that is sweeping Zimbabwe, a crisis in northwestern Pakistan as well as HIV/TB co-infections were also on the list of humanitarian emergencies.

The report detailed the invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition, which plagues 178 million children around the world. Despite advances in the availability of life-saving treatments, up to 5 million children under 5 years old die every year from malnutrition complications.

“[W]e have a special responsibility to bear witness and speak out about intolerable suffering and draw attention to basic humanitarian needs — needs that are often largely ignored,” said MSF International Council President Christophe Fournier.

Reach reporter Aditya Ganapathiraju at news@dailyuw.com.