Three days after an
earthquake devastated war-ravaged Syria, the United Nations said Wednesday that very
little aid has trickled to government-held areas and that it has been unable to
send a single convoy of aid to opposition-held territory.
اضافة اعلان
Nearly 11 million people inside Syria have
been
affected by the earthquake, according to the UN. And 4 million of them
rely on
aid agencies for basic humanitarian needs like clean water and food.
“This is a big catastrophe,” El-Mostafa
Benlamlih, the UN’s resident coordinator for Syria, said in a video briefing
with reporters on Wednesday. “We are struggling; our humanitarian work is
affected.”
The UN’s stock of humanitarian aid in Syria
will run out in the next few days, Benlamlih said. The World Food Program has
enough food in the country to feed 100,000 people for one week, he added.
Why has international help dragged?A host of problems contribute to the slow
international response in Syria, beyond damaged roads. The UN and aid agencies
have to negotiate access with the government of Bashar Al-Assad and rely on the
UN Security Council’s authority for cross-border access to opposition-held
areas.
Sanctions are another challenge, said
Syria’s UN ambassador, Bassam Sabbagh. So far, a handful of
countries have sent aid planes to Syria, he said, among them Iran, Russia, the United Arab
Emirates, Algeria, and Pakistan.
In Aleppo, a city of more than 1 million
people, 30,000 are taking shelter in schools and mosques, and about 70,000 are
on the streets, Benlamlih said.
And while waves of international search and
rescue teams, armed with life-detecting dogs, are pouring into Turkey from
every corner of the world, local volunteers are the only ones searching through
Syria’s mounts of rubble and debris.
Syria Civil Defense — the volunteer group
better known as the White Helmets — has said in videos that residents are
digging for survivors and bodies of loved ones through the ruins with their
bare hands.
Even the UN’s specialized natural disaster
assessment team was still on its way to Syria on Wednesday, said Farhan Haq,
spokesperson for the UN.
In Aleppo, a city of more than 1 million people, 30,000 are taking shelter in schools and mosques, and about 70,000 are on the streets.
The disproportionate response in Turkey and
Syria has to do with “the ability of people to mobilize in one country compared
to the other”, Haq said.
Dwindling resourcesThe UN already has about 700 staff members
based in Syria and across the border in Turkey, and for now it has relied on
stocks — food, medicine, emergency kits — in Syrian warehouses, Haq said. But
it has not yet been able to replenish those goods.
While those kinds of supplies are normally
needed in the aftermath of disasters, Syria is also facing a dire shortage of
fuel and generators, as well as heavy machinery for rescue operations and parts
to repair ambulances and trucks, the UN said.
A number of thorny and complicated
questions will determine the extent and the speed of relief to Syrians who are
facing a crisis that has only been magnified by the earthquake. Will Syria’s
government allow humanitarian convoys to cross into opposition territory? Will
the opposition accept aid from Syria’s government and its allies? And will
international donors be willing to funnel millions of dollars of aid through Assad’s government and organizations affiliated with the government?
‘Politics aside’“We are hoping that everybody puts the
interest of the people first, we keep the politics aside, and all authorities
move away from politics and put the interest of people first,” Muhannad Hadi, UN’s
regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, told reporters.
Other aid agencies on the ground in Syria
are also scrambling to meet the spike in demand. Doctors Without Borders said
its teams have provided medical items and kits to 23 local hospitals and
clinics in northern Idlib province, near the epicenter, and treated over 3,400
injured people.
The organization said many hospitals in
northwestern Syria had been too badly damaged to operate, and patients were
stranded. Two maternity clinics operated by Doctors Without Borders were
evacuated because of the risk of buildings collapsing from structural damage.
“The massive consequences of this disaster
will require an equally massive international response,” Avril Benoit, the
organization’s executive director in the US, said in a statement.
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