Earthquake relief efforts have been slowed down by issues with approval by the hardline Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a UN official told Reuters on Sunday, as the tally in Syria of people who have lost their lives after the 6 February earthquakes reaches 5,237.
Almost 5 million people are at the risk of finding themselves homeless in Syria after the disaster, according to the estimates of various international institutions, but the scale of the disaster has not altered the hostilities on the ground.
A spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian aid office said, “there are issues with approval” by HTS, which in turn leads to emergency aid being held up in territories controlled by extremist groups, Reuters reports.
The HTS media office declined to comment on the situation, but an HTS source in Idlib told Reuters that the group would not allow any shipments from government-held parts of Syria and that aid would be coming from the north through Turkey.
The UN’s emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said that international institutions “have failed the people in north-west Syria” and they “rightly feel abandoned.”
“They’re looking for international help that hasn’t arrived. My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can. That’s my focus now,” he said on Twitter.
A spokesperson for the Syria Civil Defence told the BBC, “Disappointment and abandonment is definitely the general feeling. We’re seven days into the earthquake. Our organisation has been calling for help, for manpower, for rescue equipment and in the first couple of days, we were just ignored and were left to deal with the situation on our own.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the death toll in Syria could reach 7,000, as hundreds of people are still missing. They also said that these figures do not include the dead whose victims were buried quickly after the earthquake and before the arrival of rescue teams, or the more than 1,000 Syrians killed on Turkish territory whose bodies were transferred to Syria.
Meanwhile, the Damascus government, which is under Western sanctions, while appealing for UN aid, has said that all assistance must be given in coordination with the Syrian government and should be delivered from within Syria, not across the Turkish border into rebel areas.
Currently the Cilvegözü border gate in Turkey is the only entry point for humanitarian aid being sent to Syria. The Turkish authorities said this week that they were considering opening additional border points to speed up the process.
Observers claim that the Damascus government is prioritising loyalist areas for the provision of humanitarian aid, but there are also problems in aid received through Turkey and in Turkish-controlled areas of northern Syria. The Turkish authorities have been obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the affected areas, despite regional and international appeals, the Kurdish Rojava network said on Sunday.
The network said Ankara has been trying to block the aid sent from the Kurdish-led administration in northwest Syria to the northeast, “despite the urgent need to deliver it to them, amid the loss of all the basic necessities for life, the drop in temperatures below zero, and the tens of thousands remaining homeless in the open and sleeping on the ground”.
“But what is worse and more important is that the Syrians are the tool used by the Turkish regime to exterminate their brother,” the Rojava Network said.
According to the network, Turkish-backed rebel factions have received orders from Ankara to block any faction that tries to allow the passage of humanitarian aid being delivered by the autonomous administration in the northeast.
The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) announced on Sunday that it is opening all its crossings for convoys of humanitarian aid for areas that are impacted by the earthquake, the North Press Agency reported. The administration has also guaranteed to provide whatever facilities the humanitarian convoys that will pass through its crossings may require.
The agency reported that people in northeast Syria who have received help from the Kurdish-led administration or express a desire to do so fear they could be arrested as a result.
