WHO awaits final approval to send deliveries to rebel-held northwestern Syria
WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (center), accompanied by Syrian Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash (center-left), visits an area in the northern city of Aleppo on February 11, 2023, days after after a deadly earthquake struck Turkey and Syria. (Credit: AFP via Getty Images)
The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is awaiting final approval to send cross deliveries to northwest Syria, where rebel groups in control territory of the country’s long-running civil war and aid deliveries have faced obstacles.
The WHO hopes that its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, will soon be able to travel to rebel-held areas affected by Monday’s devastating earthquake, the organization said Sunday.
Tedros and a team of senior WHO officials arrived in Aleppo on Saturday on a humanitarian aid flight carrying more than $290,000 worth of emergency and surgical kits.
Rick Brennan, WHO’s regional director for emergencies, told a news conference from Damascus on Sunday that there have been no “cross-renditions” in northwestern Syria since the earthquake struck on Monday.
“We have one scheduled for the next few days. We’re still negotiating to get it going,” Brennan said, adding that before the quake, the WHO was “planning a significant expansion of our crossover work.”
According to Brennan, the WHO has the approval of the Syrian government in Damascus, but is waiting for the “approval… of the entities on the other side.”
“We are working very, very hard to negotiate that access,” Brennan stressed.
On Sunday, the UN emergency assistance coordinator, Martin Griffiths, tweeted that “trucks with UN assistance are arriving in northwestern Syria”, posting images of trucks loaded for cross-border deliveries. Although he said he was “encouraged by the expansion of the UN transshipment center convoys on the Turkish border”, the aid chief stressed the need to “open more access points” so that aid arrives faster.
Raed Al Saleh, head of the White Helmets volunteer organization, echoed this call in a tweet on Sunday. Al Saleh said that after meeting Griffiths at the Turkish-Syrian border on Sunday, his group had appreciated the “apologies for the shortcomings and mistakes” made. He called on the UN to act now outside the Security Council to “open 3 crossings for emergency aid” in northwestern Syria.
A health care system already in trouble: the WHO official reiterated that even before the earthquake, only 51% of medical facilities in government-controlled Syria were fully operational, with around 25% to 30% at partial capacity. He said that while the WHO doesn’t have access to the same level of data when it comes to health care in the North West, they estimated “probably similar numbers” when it comes to capacity.
“I think this is one of those cases where 10 years of war, or 10 years of instability, has just pulverized this healthcare system to the point where it just can’t function properly,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the Program. WHO Health Emergencies.
“That’s not just the physical damage to the infrastructure itself, but the loss of wages, the loss of training. And it’s been that ‘death by 1,000 outages’ in the system, and then the system has reacted admirably to what it’s been a massive disaster, but there’s not much people can do,” Ryan said.