CAIRO – Dozens of local governments, volunteers, religious groups and private businesses in Virginia have cooperated together to deliver tons of coats and blankets to Syrian refugees in Turkey, offering them a warmer winter.

The effort was kicked off last November when volunteers began boxing donations from 13 states and the District of Columbia, Good News Network reported on Monday, February 22.

Moreover, the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, made up of 14 local governments in Washington DC suburbs, have participated in the coat and blanked drive for the third consecutive winter.

The number of coats and blankets quickly reached 144,710 pounds — more than four times as much as in the group’s first drive.

Voluntary efforts extended when Paxton Companies and Maersk stepped in to ship the 4,900 boxes of donations to Turkey for free.

A team from Virginia joined two nonprofit groups there, Embrace Relief and Kimse Yok Mu, to help distribute the cold weather gear to families and individuals bracing against the cold.

As the conflict in Syria enters its fifth year, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has released a new report that the number of children affected by the civil war in Syria has more than doubled over the past year.

UNICEF said the child casualty rates were the highest recorded in any recent conflict in the region.

It cited UN figures that at least 10,000 children have been killed in the Syrian war but noted that the real number is probably higher.

The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said that more than 136,000 have been killed since a revolt against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011.

The UNICEF report said 2 million children needed some form of psychological support or treatment while a total of 5.5 million children were affected by the conflict – some of them inside Syria and others living abroad as refugees.

This is more than twice the number of children affected by the conflict in March 2013, when UNICEF estimated it had impacted 2.3 million young Syrians.

The number of children displaced inside Syria has risen to nearly 3 million from 920,000 a year ago. Meanwhile, UNICEF said the number of child refugees has grown to 1.2 million from 260,000 since last year – 425,000 of them under 5 years old.