United Nations Syria will let humanitarian aid flow through its
main border crossing into rebel-held areas, reopening a conduit
that had closed after a Security Council stalemate, the countrys UN
ambassador said Thursday.
Damascus has made a sovereign decision to let aid move overland
from Turkey through the Bab al-Hawa crossing in northwest Syria for
six months starting Thursday, ambassador Bassam Sabbagh told
reporters.
He said he sent a letter to this effect to Secretary-General
Antonio Guterres and the UN Security Council.
Through an arrangement that began in 2014, the UN largely
delivers relief to northwest Syria via neighboring Turkey through
the Bab al-Hawa crossing.
But a UN deal allowing for this mechanism to work without the
authorization of Damascus expired on Monday.
The UN says more than four million people in northwest Syria are
in need of food, water, medicine and other essentials.
Russia on Tuesday vetoed a nine-month extension of the
agreement, and then failed to muster enough votes to adopt a
six-month extension, during a vote at UN headquarters in New
York.
Guterres spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN was studying
Sabbaghs letter.
Even as the Bab al-Hawa crossing closed, two other crossings
remained operational.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad opened them after an earthquake
in February that killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey and
northwest Syria.
But 85 percent of the aid reaching rebel-held areas went through
Bab al-Hawa.
Gold standard monitoring
Damascus regularly denounces the aid deliveries as a violation
of its sovereignty, and Russia has been chipping away at the deal
for years.
The cross-border aid accord originally allowed for four entry
points into rebel-held Syria before being reduced to one Bab
al-Hawa after years of pressure from China and Russia at the
Security Council.
Moscow is a major ally of Damascus, and its intervention in
Syria since 2015 helped to turn the tide in the regimes favor.
Syrias conflict has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced
millions and battered the countrys infrastructure and industry.
The 15 Security Council members had been trying for days to find
a compromise to extend the cross-border aid deal.
The priority needs to be getting aid flowing again, fast, to the
people who need it - and then getting certainty over its future,
ambassador Barbara Woodward of Britain, which is chairing the
Security Council for the month of July, said after the announcement
by Syrias ambassador.
But without UN monitoring, control of this critical lifeline has
been handed to the man responsible for the Syrian peoples
suffering, she added.
Woodward said that under the old UN arrangement, aid going
t...
