U.N. Relief Official Calls Crisis in Aleppo the ‘Apex of Horror’
U.N. Relief Official Calls Crisis in Aleppo the ‘Apex of Horror’
The top aid official at the United Nations gave a gloomy assessment of the Syria
relief effort on Monday, saying no convoy deliveries had been made to
besieged areas this month and that the suffering in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial epicenter, was the “apex of horror.”
In
a briefing to the Security Council, the official, Stephen O’Brien, the
under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said that while he
welcomed Russia’s
support last week for a 48-hour cease-fire in Aleppo — as he had
proposed earlier in the month — there had been no assurances from other
combatants.
“This
cannot be a one-sided offer,” Mr. O’Brien said. “Plans are in place,
but we need the agreement of all parties to let us do our job.”
What I Saw in Syria
United Nations officials have said that the fighting in Aleppo
— pitting Syrian government forces and their Russian backers against an
array of insurgents, including Islamist militants — has left 275,000
people in rebel-held eastern Aleppo completely cut off from food, water
and medicine, and has severely limited aid deliveries to 1.5 million
people in government-held western Aleppo.
Humanitarian
access to hundreds of thousands of Syrians in other combat zones has
been blocked by fighting, security concerns and the Syrian bureaucracy,
Mr. O’Brien said, despite an international agreement reached in May to
permit truck convoy deliveries.
As a result, Mr. O’Brien said, no convoys were dispatched in August, despite some successful, if limited, deliveries in July.
“We unfortunately appear to be, once again, in reverse gear,” Mr. O’Brien said.
He described the crisis in Aleppo, portrayed in images of dead and wounded children like that of a 5-year-old boy pulled from the rubble last week, as “the apex of horror at its most horrific extent of the suffering of people.”
While
he said efforts were still underway to secure the proposed 48-hour
cease-fire in Aleppo, Mr. O’Brien expressed little hope of avoiding “a
humanitarian catastrophe unparalleled in the over five years of
bloodshed and carnage in the Syrian conflict.”
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