UN Plans First Air Drops of Food Aid to Besieged in Syria

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said requests were still pending with the government for convoys to bring aid to 50,000 people in Afrin, 50,000 in eastern Aleppo city, 75,000 in the western Aleppo countryside and 50,000 in northern rural Aleppo province.

“In last 24 hours, 114 big trucks delivered life-saving humanitarian supplies to 80,000 people in five besieged areas”.

Egeland provided no details of the aerial operation but said airdrops were the only way to reach “the poor people inside Deir ez-Zor”. Despite aid being delivered to some besieged areas of Syria thanks to the cessation of hostilities agreement reached last week in Munich, it is only the beginning of the task assigned to the group, according to the envoys Special Advisor, Jan Egeland.

She did not specify when the air drops would begin but said a single aircraft would be used initially.

“Air drops in Deir al-Zor has become a very concrete proposal”, he said.

“It is either air drops or nothing. Airdrops are a desperate measure in desperate times”. Egeland chaired a three-hour meeting of the humanitarian task force on Syria, where he said that many member states pledged support for the attempt to reach Deir al-Zor, citing “excellent cooperation” between Russian Federation and the United States.

He said that reaching over 480,000 people in besieged areas was the first step.

All parties to the conflict are believed to have used siege warfare – where military forces surround an area and cut off essential supplies – in breach of global law.

“The convoys arrived Wednesday night to Moadamiyeh, Zabadani and Madaya in Rural Damascus and Foah and Kefraya in Rural Idlib”. An estimate by the Siege Watch project, run by the Dutch NGO PAX and the US-based Syria Institute, puts the number much higher at 1 million people. It said data from hospitals and clinics it supports recorded 154,647 war-injured people and 7,009 war dead in 2015, 30 to 40 percent of whom were women and children.

More than four million others are living in what the United Nations defines as “hard-to-reach” areas.