UN planning to airlift aid to Syria’s Qamishli

The UN said Thursday it would begin flying desperately-needed aid from Damascus to the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli, which has been inaccessible by domestic roads for more than two years.

“We are just about to launch an air bridge into Qamishli from Damascus,” the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, told reporters.

“The reason for this is that we have run out of meaningful means to reach people over land,” he said, adding that the airlift “…will bring life-saving assistance to a very large number of people.”

Qamishli, near the Turkish border, lies in Hasakeh governorate, which can only be reached by road in Syria by driving through the governorates of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, which are dominated by the Islamic State group.

“They haven’t been reached by land from within the country since early 2014,” said Bettina Luescher, spokeswoman for the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) which will coordinate the operation.

She told AFP that the flights, 25 in all over the next month, each carrying 14 tonnes of aid, are expected to begin “in the next few days.”

Some 1,000 tonnes of relief items — consisting 70 percent of food — will be flown in to a nearby airport and distributed in the town, Luescher said.

She said the aim during the first month was to feed 150,000 people.

The UN previously set up an airlift to bring aid to Qamishli in 2014, and has also delivered assistance across the border from Turkey, but the main border crossing has been closed since the beginning of the year.

– ‘Starvation’ –

Qamishli is far from the only part of war-ravaged Syria desperate for aid.

Jan Egeland, head of a UN-backed international humanitarian taskforce for the war-ravaged country, told reporters that aid workers were still struggling to reach all of Syria’s 18 besieged areas — most of them encircled by government forces or their allies.

Since the beginning of the year, aid has been delivered at least once to 16 of those areas, but Erbin and Zamalka in rural Damascus have gone without potentially life-saving assistance since November 2012.

“We hope to reach them next week,” Egeland said, adding that the sticking point was a disagreement over how many people are inside the two areas.

The UN estimates the number is around 40,000, but “the government has so far only cleared a fraction of that for delivery,” he said, stressing that “we need to be able to go to all of the people there.”

Egeland also voiced alarm that fighting was hindering aid from reaching a number of areas that had previously been accessible, including Madaya, where dozens of people starved to death late last year, and which has not received aid since April.

“Starvation will start in those areas if there is no cessation of hostilities,” he warned.

Syria’s conflict began in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government demonstrations. It has killed more than 280,000 people and displaced millions.

Peace efforts have failed to end the violence, and a truce brokered by the US and Russia has all but collapsed.

UN mediator Staffan de Mistura hopes peace talks can resume in July, but has warned they cannot proceed “while hostilities are escalating and civilians are starving”.

He told reporters Thursday he was travelling to New York and would take part in a UN Security Council meeting on June 29 to seek guidance on how to ensure “the best conditions” for the talks.