UN official calls Aleppo crisis ‘apex of horror’
275,000 in rebel-held east cut off from food
UNITED NATIONS: The top aid official at the United Nations gave a gloomy assessment of the Syria relief effort on Monday, saying that no convoy deliveries had been made to besieged areas this month and that the suffering in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial epicentre, was the “apex of horror”.
In a briefing to the Security Council, the official, Stephen O’Brien, undersecretarygeneral for humanitarian affairs, said that while he welcomed Russia’s support last week for a 48-hour cease-fire in Aleppo — as he had proposed earlier in the month — there had been no assurances from other combatants. “This cannot be a one-sided offer,” Mr O’Brien said. “Plans are in place, but we need the agreement of all parties to let us do our job.”
UN officials have said the fighting in Aleppo — pitting Syrian government forces and their Russian backers against an array of insurgents, including Islamist militants — has left 275,000 people in rebel-held eastern Aleppo completely cut off from food, water and medicine, and has severely limited aid deliveries to 1.5 million people in government-held western Aleppo.
Humanitarian access to hundreds of thousands of Syrians in other combat zones has been blocked by fighting, security concerns and the Syrian bureaucracy, Mr O’Brien said, despite an international agreement reached in May to permit truck convoy deliveries.
As a result, Mr O’Brien said, no convoys were dispatched in August, despite some successful, if limited, deliveries in July.
“We unfortunately appear to be, once again, in reverse gear,” Mr O’Brien said.
He described the crisis in Aleppo, portrayed in images of dead and wounded children like that of a 5-year-old boy pulled from the rubble last week, as “the apex of horror at its most horrific extent of the suffering of people”.
While he said efforts were still underway to secure the proposed 48-hour ceasefire in Aleppo, he expressed little hope of avoiding “a humanitarian catastrophe unparalleled in the over five years of bloodshed and carnage in the Syrian conflict”.