U.N. official: Lulls too short to aid Syrian civilians

BEIRUT — The daily fivehour pauses in fighting in Syria’s embattled eastern suburbs of Damascus — laid out under a “unilateral” plan by Russia — are not enough to take in aid or evacuate civilians, a top U.N. aid official said Thursday.

Jan Egeland also said the U.N. Security Council resolution over the weekend calling for a 30-day cease-fire has done little to improve the situation in the rebel-held region east of Damascus, the capital.

“Since it was adopted, it did not get better — it got worse,” he said.

Eastern Ghouta was among the first areas to rise up against President Bashar Assad’s rule in 2011. The area was taken over by rebels as unrest turned into an armed insurgency, then a full-blown civil war now 7 years old.

Egeland’s comments came after the Russian military accused Syria’s rebels of shelling a humanitarian corridor that Moscow set up with the Syrian government, offering residents of Damascus’ besieged eastern suburbs a way out of the embattled enclave.

Later Thursday, Maj. Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, chief of the Russian military’s Center for Reconciliation in Syria, said militants in Ghouta were carrying out public executions of people who want to leave the area. He said “the hotline of the Russian reconciliation center has begun receiving calls about public executions of those who are trying to flee from the enclave.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a five-hour daily humanitarian pause to allow civilians to exit the region. The daily pauses began Tuesday, but so far, no humanitarian aid has gone in and no civilians have left, except for an elderly Pakistani man and his wife who were evacuated from the town of Douma on Thursday.

The Syrian Red Crescent confirmed that it managed to evacuate the family to Damascus, handing them over to the Pakistani Embassy. The Kumait news agency, close to the Army of Islam rebel group based in Douma, reported that the man and his wife had been living in Syria for more than 40 years and were evacuated after months of negotiations.

Egeland, who heads humanitarian aid matters in the office of the U.N. Syria envoy, said the Russian plan for the five-hour pauses was “positive” but insufficient. He said that no aid has been sent to eastern Ghouta because “we did not get a single facilitation letter by the government.”

“I know of no humanitarian actor … who thinks that five hours is enough for us to be able to deliver relief into eastern Ghouta and to organize orderly medical evacuations out,” he said.

He said a meeting of the U.N.’s humanitarian task force for Syria earlier Thursday focused on whether it was possible to work with Russia and other parties to make the pause “meet humanitarian standards.”

Information for this article was contributed by Zeynep Bilginsoy, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Jim Heintz and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.