U.N. approves aid to Syria via one crossing

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council approved a resolution Saturday authorizing humanitarian aid deliveries to Syria’s mainly rebel-held northwest from Turkey through just one crossing point, a victory for Russia in cutting another crossing that the U.N. and aid groups have called critical.

Russia, Syria’s most important ally, argued that aid should be delivered from within the country across conflict lines and just one crossing point is needed.

The U.N. and humanitarian groups argued unsuccessfully — along with the vast majority of the

U.N. Security Council — that two crossing points were essential to get aid to the 2.8 million needy people in the northwest, especially with the first case of COVID-19 recently reported in the region.

The vote was 12-0, with Russia, China and the Dominican Republic abstaining — Russia most likely because two amendments it proposed were rejected.

Saturday’s vote capped a week of high-stakes rivalry between Russia and China, and the 13 other council members who voted twice to maintain the two crossings from Turkey that were in operation until their mandate ended Friday.

Both times, Russia and China vetoed the resolutions — the 15th and 16th veto by Russia of a Syria resolution since the conflict began in 2011, and the ninth and 10th by China.

Germany and Belgium, which sponsored the widely-supported resolutions for two crossing points, were forced to back down by the threat of another Russian veto, and their latest draft authorized only the single crossing point from Turkey for a year.

Ahead of the vote, Physicians for Human Rights’ Policy Director Susannah Sirkin said Russia and China’s “cynical and cruel maneuvering” to cut off life-saving aid using their veto power and seeking to close one critical border crossing “is one more tragic example of the broken U.N. humanitarian system, and a defamation of its Charter.”

Russia has insisted from the beginning of negotiations that it wanted to cut back aid deliveries to a single crossing point for six months. Germany and Belgium wanted to maintain the two crossing points — Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salaam — for a year.

After the latest Russian veto on Friday, Germany and Belgium circulated a draft resolution to extend the mandate through the Bab al-Hawa crossing for a year and the mandate for the Bab al-Salaam crossing — which Russia wanted to eliminate — for three months to wind up its activities.

But Russia objected to even three months, so it was eliminated, diplomats said.

U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft tweeted Friday: “Russia & China are using politics to prop up the Assad regime while more than 3 million people are in desperate need of aid. We cannot allow the Bab al-Salaam border crossing, where 30 percent of UNICEF’s aid enters Syria, to close. The lives of 500,000 children are at risk.”

Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, tweeted Thursday that the Bab Al-Hawa crossing “accounts for more than 85 percent of total volume of operations.”

“We categorically reject claims that Russia wants to stop humanitarian deliveries to the Syrian population in need,” he wrote.