Damascus is using aid as ‘weapon of war’
BEIRUT: Aid deliveries have all but stopped for hundreds of thousands of Syrians living under siege, a medical group said this week, raising the risk of death from starvation, malnutrition or a lack of basic medical care.
As Syria’s war enters its seventh year, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have recaptured all the country’s major urban centres while continuing to pressure what remains of the once large rebel-held enclaves around the capital, Damascus, despite a nationwide ceasefire.
Tens of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire, most of them heavily dependent on UN aid deliveries that require the approval of the Syrian government.
Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based group monitoring humanitarian conditions in Syria, said the flow of lifesaving humanitarian supplies has slowed to a trickle since the start of the year. Only one UN convoy reached its destination in January, while two arrived last month, it said.
Aid groups say that more than a million Syrians live under siege without access to sustained humanitarian assistance.
“Our findings show a clear pattern of obstruction and manipulation by Syrian authorities, who ensure that approved aid rarely reaches its intended targets, and when it does, it is wholly inadequate,” said Elise Baker, the organisation’s lead Syria researcher.
Humanitarian access was meant to accompany a ceasefire brokered in December by Russia and Turkey. But in January, Jan Egeland, a senior UN adviser, blamed the stoppage on a “complete, hopeless, bureaucratic quagmire”.
While the UN usually works in countries at the invitation of the governments that host it, critics say its reliance on the approval of Assad’s security apparatus has allowed aid to be used as a weapon of war.
In the besieged rebel-held town of Madaya, dozens of civilians starved to death last year after months without any aid deliveries.
Although convoys have reached the area since, doctors say the contents are often ill-suited to needs.
Food deliveries have sometimes carried carbohydrates but no protein, leading to malnutrition among the residents.
UN officials say government soldiers have also removed antibiotics, anaesthetics and burn-treatment kits from trucks bound for areas where operating theatres had run out of supplies.
On Monday, a coalition of 81 relief groups, most of them Syrian, called for an end to the sieges, with full and unhindered humanitarian access and passage for civilians.
Husam Al Katlaby, a representative of the Violations Documentation Centre, a Syrian human rights group, said the Syrian army had cut off aid to an estimated 450 000 people in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta, an area that attracted global attention in 2013 after a deadly chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government.