Tribune. Between now and Sunday, July 11, the United Nations Security Council will face a crucial choice. For the millions of Syrians who are suffering the consequences of ten years of war, this decision is vital in the first sense of the word: it will be right, or not, with their lives.
It will condition the delivery of international humanitarian aid on which 75% of the population depend for their most basic needs: food, health care, housing. In Syria, the war has devastated everything for ten years, education, health, water, sanitation, leading to poverty, precariousness, misery… Ten years of conflict which have pulverized all the figures for the worst humanitarian catastrophes since the Second World War.
Distress, malnutrition
Resolution 2165, adopted unanimously by the United Nations Security Council in July 2014, allowed UN humanitarian agencies and their partners to channel aid without the prior authorization of the Syrian authorities through several crossing points. A resolution that has always been questioned, especially with the bombing of humanitarian convoys and the reduction to a single crossing point in July 2020 – with the removal of the border posts from Al-Yarubiyah to Iraq, from Al -Ramtha towards Jordan and from Bab Al-Salamah towards Turkey, and the maintenance of a single access to Bab Al-Hawa, at the Turkish-Syrian border, for one year.
This week therefore plays out the renewal of this single point of passage. To date, nearly a thousand UN trucks pass through this corridor every month, in order to deliver medicines, food, vaccines, shelter, water, sanitation facilities, etc. The Bab Al-Hawa crossing point is the final gateway, through which more than half of the humanitarian assistance for northwestern Syria passes. Since 2014, nearly 50,000 trucks have been able to transit thanks to this resolution. As a reminder, in Syria, 13.4 million people are in humanitarian distress, 1 in 3 children are malnourished …
As a medical NGO, we believe that the consequences of closing this last humanitarian corridor would be terrible. It should be remembered that it also allows the delivery of vaccines against Covid-19. Our humanitarian action on the ground is interdependent with cross-border aid from UN agencies.
Red line
Discussions, which have already started within the Security Council, see Russia – the main ally of the Syrian regime – campaigning for humanitarian aid to pass only through the front lines (cross lines), in other words, that it be controlled and centralized directly by Damascus under the pretext of maintaining Syrian sovereignty.
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