Hungry Syrians Now Butcher Lion For Food-See Pictures

Residents in areas hardest hit by the civil war, including the eastern area of Ghouta, were residents have reported desperate food shortages.

Last month a cleric issued a fatwa to allow starving people in the region to eat cats and dogs.

'We issued a religious edict allowing people to eat dog and cat meat. Not because it is religiously permitted, but because it is a reflection of the reality we are suffering,' said Sheikh Saleh al-Khatib.

'People here have nothing for their children. I am on strike because I want to help save food for others.'

More than two million Syrians fled their homes because of the country's raging conflict, seeking shelter in neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. At least half of the refugees - 1.1 million - are children.

In Lebanon, hundreds of refugee children - many of them girls aged seven to 12 - are picked up daily at dozens of informal refugee settlements dotting the Bekaa Valley and border areas in the north, loaded onto trucks and taken to the fields where they work for six to eight hours and earn up to 6,000 Lebanese pounds per day.

Many Syrian refugee children in Lebanon also fall into the hands of criminal gangs specialized in exploiting the most vulnerable victims of the conflict.

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