Human Rights Watch (HWR) stated on Wednesday that the “slow humanitarian response” to opposition-held northwest Syria after the earthquake highlights the “inadequacy” of the UN’s makes an attempt to transport support around the Turkish border, including that delays are “deadly”.
The Syrian authorities’s authorisation of 2 extra border crossings into northwestern Syria for simply 3 months “is too little, too late”, stated HRW’s deputy Middle East director Adam Coogle.
He added that the Syrian authorities’s “record of obstructing aid, combined with the failure of the cross-border mechanism authorised by the Security Council to meet the urgent needs of Syrians in the besieged northwest, demonstrates that alternative aid systems are necessary.”
In the days after the earthquakes, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths called for more cross-border access to people in need.
Griffiths acknowledged on 12 February, six days after the first earthquake, that the UN had “failed” the people of northwest Syria.
Tuesday, a UN convoy entered the opposition-held areas of northwestern Syria through the Bab al-Salam border crossing, a crossing point on the Turkish border that the organisation has been able to use again after several years without access.
Opposition areas in the northern Syrian provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, the hardest hit by the earthquakes, did not receive their first UN humanitarian aid until four days after the disaster, prompting a barrage of criticism of the organisation.
Even before the earthquakes, Syrians were facing one of the worst economic and humanitarian crises since the civil war began in 2011, struggling with a fuel crisis, a cholera outbreak and rising food insecurity.
Most of northwestern Syria’s population of about four million was dependent on humanitarian aid before the natural disaster.
“Civilians in those spaces are successfully trapped, lack the assets to relocate, are not able to go into Turkey and concern persecution in the event that they try to relocate to government-controlled spaces,” HRW stated.
