Delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged areas of Syria continues to be blocked, and severely malnourished children will die if they are not reached soon, United Nations officials said Thursday.
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“I am supposed to report to, what I will be telling to them”. The UN had hoped to reach 1 million people in besieged and hard-to-reach areas with convoys of food aid in May, but supplies had only got to 160,000 people, he said.
While in other areas where the approvals were based on a number of conditions, like the besieged rebel held towns of Daraya and Douma, “we haven’t been able to reach the people at all”, he added.
United Nations special envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura attends a news conference after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, May 3, 2016.
The UN has resorted to air drops of food to reach 110,000 people besieged by Islamic State militants in the town of Deir al-Zor, and is considering air drops to places besieged by government forces if it doesn’t get permission to go in by land.
The Syrian government, he said, has also “authorized and cooperated with the Iranian military authorities for airdrops or airlifts by helicopters of Iranian military to the two locations of Kefraya and Foua”, in Idlib province in the northwest.
De Mistura says he wants the council to “guide” him and said the talks should resume urgently amid continued violence in the country. It is unclear how the outside powers would cooperate in overflying and dropping aid in the contested areas.
Mr Egeland said delivering aid had been far harder than anticipated. “And we have, in some places, been denied going there because the access route was not cleared, or was not safe and there was fighting in these places”.
However, the talks were brought to a halt after the main foreign-backed opposition group, known as the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), walked out of the discussions to protest at what it called the Syrian government’s violation of a shaky ceasefire. On that day, however, it said it would delay those plans at the request of the United States. But he says the humanitarian situation and a wobbly truce needed to improve for the talks to be “credible”.
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After briefing the UN Security Council on the current situation in Syria, de Mistura said in a statement on Thursday night that they “need to see progress on the ground – particularly in reference to the cessation of hostilities and humanitarian access”, before the new round of talks.
