United Nations May Fall Short in Food Aid for Syria
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Version 0 of 1. WASHINGTON — The United Nations’ food agency said Tuesday that it might not be able to meet its goal of aiding three million Syrians in July. The agency, the World Food Program, had reached only 2.4 million people as fighting intensified in areas near Damascus and Homs, Elisabeth Byrs, the agency’s senior public information officer, said Tuesday in an interview. “Dispatches of food are slower because of the situation right now,” Ms. Byrs said. Steve Taravella, a senior spokesman for the food agency in Washington, said that it had 700 trucks in the country, but that convoys had been unable to reach many distribution points in the past several weeks. Eight trucks carrying more than 300 metric tons of flour were attacked in June — it was unclear by whom — in Deir al-Zour, in northeast Syria, and only four were able to distribute food. The flour was intended to go to 13,600 families, Mr. Taravella said, but the agency could distribute aid to only about 6,700 of them. On May 29, another armed group in the village of Tal Menes seized a truck carrying flour that was headed to Aleppo. In June, the World Food Program provided about 2.5 million people with food inside Syria, aiding the greatest number of people in Aleppo. The group operates seven food warehouses and dozens of distribution points in Syria. A typical food basket from the agency contains rice, bulgur, wheat, sugar, pasta, vegetable oil and lentils, according to the group’s Web site. The World Food Program also provides families with a monthly ration of 11 pounds of bread per person. “We won’t know for a few weeks whether we will reach our goal,” Mr. Taravella said. “But we announced the findings because we want the humanitarian community to understand the scope of the need.” Ms. Byrs said she was particularly worried about the people in Homs, where fighting has increased in the past several days. As of Monday, the agency had reached about 300,000 people there this month, but Ms. Byrs said she believed that more than 2,500 people were trapped in the Old City without access to any aid. “The monthly distribution to Homs is still ongoing; 92 percent of the allocation has been dispatched, but the besieged areas of the Old City are out of reach for us,” she said. “We cannot reach them because of the military operation.” International aid groups have had difficulty delivering supplies since the Syrian war began more than two years ago. At the start of the fighting, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent was the only organization delivering aid and providing medical care to civilians. President Bashar al-Assad blocked all other groups from establishing operations. Since then, organizations like the World Food Program and the United Nations Refugee Agency have found ways to deliver aid in rebel-held regions, but they still have difficulty reaching areas controlled by Mr. Assad’s government. And when aid does arrive there, it does not always go to those most in need. “There are thousands of examples of this, where civilians are in need of care but have no access to it because the regime continues to take advantage of directing it only to supporters,” said Alexander Page, a Syrian activist living abroad. Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, runs five hospitals in northern Syria in areas controlled by the rebels but has not received official authorization to work in the country. It said last month that a measles epidemic was sweeping through northern Syria and that its medical teams had vaccinated more than 75,000 children in Aleppo, Raqqah and Idlib Provinces. But the fighting has hampered the vaccination campaign, the group said in a statement. People have avoided standing in line for the vaccinations for fear they might attract airstrikes or rocket attacks, it said. Ms. Byrs said it costs the World Food Program $29.3 million to $30 million each week to finance aid operations. The organization is seeking $763 million in contributions through the end of the year to help up to seven million Syrians, including four million people in Syria and almost three million refugees in neighboring countries. |