SARMADA, SYRIA – The first UN delegation to visit rebel-held northwestern Syria since last week’s earthquake crossed over from Turkey Tuesday, an AFP correspondent reported, as anger simmers at the world body’s slow response.
More than 35,000 people were killed when the quake devastated swathes of Syria and neighboring Turkey on February 6, at least 3,600 of them in Syria, according to government officials and emergency services in rebel areas.
“A multi-agency mission has gone this morning from the Turkey side across the border crossing… It’s largely an assessment mission,” the World Food Program’s Syria director, Kenn Crossley, told AFP in Geneva.
The delegation comprised deputy regional humanitarian coordinator David Carden and Sanjana Quazi, who heads the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Turkey.
They visited a WFP centre in Sarmada, near the Turkish border, and held a 40-minute meeting with officials at the Bab al-Hawa crossing – the only transit point on the Turkish border for UN aid deliveries to rebel-held areas.
Activists and emergency teams in the northwest have decried the UN’s slow response to the quake in rebel-held areas, contrasting it with the planeloads of humanitarian aid that have been delivered to government-controlled airports.
On a visit to the Turkish side of the Bab al-Hawa crossing on Sunday, during which he met Syrian rescue teams, UN relief chief Martin Griffiths admitted that the world body had “so far failed the people in northwest Syria”.
Griffiths also visited government-controlled areas devastated by the earthquake.
Before the quake struck, almost all of the humanitarian aid for the over four million people living in rebel-controlled areas was delivered from Turkey through the Bab al-Hawa crossing.