Monitoring
GENEVA: Doctors Without Borders—a French aid group—called Sunday for the urgent speeding up of quake relief aid to northwest Syria as it delivered a convoy with emergency aid.
Aid operations have been slow to reach Syria’s rebel-held parts since the 6 February shake killed a combined total of over 44,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
Doctors Without Borders said that an urgent increase in the supplies is required to match the scale of the disaster.
The mission’s head in Syria Hakim Khaldi said that supplies are currently not even matching the pre-quake volume. The group emptied its emergency stocks in 3 days.
The group said that the UN data after 5 days of the quake revealed that only ten trucks had entered in Syria’s rebel-held areas through the Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey. It was lower than the average weekly level for last year.
Aid group’s quake relief activities
On Sunday, a convoy of fourteen trucks full of 1,269 tents and winter kits sent by the group had reached in Syria through the Al-Hammam crossing in the Afrin area.
The group said that the aid package delivery was arranged outside of the United Nations (UN) cross-border humanitarian mechanism.
Activists and emergency teams in northwest parts of Syria have criticized a slow UN response to the earthquake in rebel-held parts, contrasting it with the planeloads of assistance that have been sent to government-controlled airports.
Before the earthquake, almost all of the crucial humanitarian assistance for the over 4 million people living in rebel-held parts was being sent through just one crossing, Bab al-Hawa.
The UN announced Monday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to open 2 more border crossings from Turkey to northwest Syria to allow in assistance packages.
Since the earthquake, the UN has sent over 170 aid trucks to northwest Syria.
The conflict in Syria began in 2011 with the ruthless repression of peaceful protests and escalated to draw in foreign powers and global jihadists.
Nearly half a million people have been vanished, and the conflict has forced out around half of the Syria’s pre-war population from their homes.
