The United Nations is poised to resume aid deliveries into north-western Syria, an area controlled by rebels, via a crossing that has been a lifeline for the region, after aid workers said Damascus appeared to loosen terms that had led to a hiatus.
Deliveries from Turkey via the Bab al-Hawa crossing stopped in July when western powers and Russia, the Syrian government’s main ally, failed to agree on extending a UN security council mandate for the operation. Syria then gave unilateral approval – but on terms that the UN rejected as unacceptable.
After weeks of diplomacy, a Syrian government letter sent to the UN this week and seen by Reuters did not mention the rejected conditions. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, welcomed an “understanding” with Damascus on using the Bab al-Hawa crossing for six months, Farhan Haq, his deputy spokesperson said on Tuesday.
The north-west is the last major bastion of rebels fighting President Assad in the 12-year-long Syrian war, and millions of people there depend on UN aid.
NGOs and individual states have long organised unilateral aid convoys into the north-west, but UN agencies will not cross the border without government or security council approval. The UN had been using Bab al-Hawa since 2014 with security council authorisation but Syria rejected the operation as a violation of sovereignty.
The terms set by Damascus in July included barring the UN from engaging with what it calls “terrorist organisations” in the rebel-held region. They also limited who could oversee and facilitate deliveries to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
A letter seen by Reuters from Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, to Bassam Sabbagh, Syria’s ambassador to the UN, on 5 August said the UN “may need to engage with different actors in north-west Syria” while it conducted aid operations.
It also said that his office, not the ICRC and SARC, held the mandate to oversee operations in north-west Syria and that the two organisations did not have sufficient presence in that region to take over such humanitarian work.
In a 6 August letter, Sabbagh thanked Griffiths “for the clarifications on some of the essential operational modalities” and said Syria “looks forward to the involvement” of the ICRC and SARC “when circumstances permit”, without mentioning the earlier conditions.
The Syrian government did not immediately respond to questions on whether it had loosened the preconditions and why.
The spokesperson for Guterres said late on Tuesday that Syria had reaffirmed its “consent” in recent days to the crossing’s use and that the agreement would allow the UN and partners to provide cross-border aid “in a principled manner that allows engagement with all parties“.
A spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian operations agency OCHA said the agency was “ready to resume aid operations through the Bab al-Hawa crossing as soon as possible”.
Syria has recently extended unilateral permission for two other border crossings from Turkey to be used to bring in aid, which it had initially granted in the wake of the earthquake in February.
Tanya Evans, country director at the International Rescue Committee, said the approval agreed for the use of the crossing would expire in February, in the depths of winter, raising concerns about the ability to scale up the aid response.
Evans said the committee preferred the security and stability of a long-term security council resolution over the Syrian government’s unilateral and short-term approval.
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