Assad regime stalling humanitarian aid: UN
Syrian government forces among those blockading civilian refugees
BEIRUT Syria is preventing the distribution of humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of its citizens and “concrete” action by the United Nations Security Council is required to prevent their deaths, the United Nations warned Friday.
Valerie Amos, the UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, describing a civil war characterized by “breathtaking levels of savagery,” said the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad continues to slow response to the crisis. “Time is running out. More people will die,” she said.
In the past year, Damascus had given the UN access to just three of the 33 besieged towns and cities it had tried to reach, leaving entire communities suffering with little food, clean water or medication, Amos told the Security Council. As well as demanding that the aid effort first seek permission from a string of its ministries, Syrian troops removed medical supplies from two convoys granted access, she said.
A UN Security Council resolution last year demanded humanitarian aid access to civilians caught in the war. But that has been flagrantly ignored by all fighting parties. The number of citizens living under blockade, at risk from dehydration, starvation and death, has doubled in the last year.
Many of these 440,000 men, women and children were besieged by Islamic State militants and other opposition groups.
But Amos said as many as 185, 500 people were trapped by government forces, “despite their assertions that they have a responsibility to look after their own people.”
Footage published online from Yarmouk, a suburb of Damascus besieged by Syrian forces, showed emaciated children near a dustbin picking up grains of rice from the ground.
Assad told CBS News this week that he would be “open” to a dialogue with the United States, based on “mutual respect.”
Meanwhile, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global chemical weapons watchdog, said Friday that it would investigate allegations of a chlorine gas attack on a Syrian village in northern Idlib province that reportedly killed six people this month. The attack on Sarmin came 10 days after the Security Council condemned the use of chlorine as a weapon in Syria and threatened to take action if such arms were used again in the conflict.
The regime has denied dropping chlorine gas bombs from its helicopters. But evidence from victims and witnesses, video footage and scientific testing of soil samples in the area points to the contrary.