“We are just about to launch an air bridge into Qamishli from Damascus,” said Yacoub El Hillo, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Syria.
Qamishli, located in Rojava, northern Syria, is only accessible domestically by road through Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, both of which are under Islamic State control, cutting it off by land from Damascus for more than two years.
The town is on the border with Turkey but the main border crossing has been closed since the beginning of the year, preventing the UN from delivering aid through Turkey as they had done previously.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which will carry out the operation, confirmed that 25 flights, each carrying 40 tonnes of aid, will fly into Qamishli over the next month.
Flights are expected to begin “in the next few days,” stated Bettina Luescher, spokesperson for WFP. She added that the aim is to feed 150,000 people.
The UN also carried out an airlift of aid to Qamishli in 2014.
A Syrian airline was flying into Qamishli but charged a 50% tax on some goods, including medicine, and Damascus stopped the flights in late May.
Earlier this month, the border crossing between Rojava and the Kurdistan Region was re-opened in order to allow humanitarian goods, including food and medicine, to cross the border. The goods are not subjected to tax.
The UN has identified 18 besieged areas that are in need of aid in Syria. Most of them are encircled by government forces or allies of Damascus.
Aid has been delivered to 16 of these areas on at least one occasion so far this year and the UN is hopeful that Damascus will agree to deliveries to the remaining two areas of Erbin and Zamalka in rural Damascus which have not received aid since November 2012.
The beleaguered Kurdish neighbourhood of Aleppo, Sheikh Maqsoud, received a convoy of UN aid on Thursday, local media reported.
Fighting is also hindering the delivery of aid. Jan Egeland, head of an international taskforce for Syria backed by the UN, has warned that people will die if aid is not delivered to places where no access has been possible since April. “Starvation will start in those areas if there is no cessation of hostilities,” he said.
Dozens starved to death in the town of Madaya last year and it is again desperate for aid, which it last received two months ago.
The UN estimated today that 5 million Syrians are trapped in besieged or hard to reach areas and in need of aid. This number has grown by nearly a million since the UN last released figures of 4.1 million in need of aid in April, mainly due to insecurity.
“This large increase is based on several factors, but primarily the inclusion of areas in parts of Aleppo, Raqqa and Hasakeh governorates as a result of insecurity, as well as constrained access for humanitarian actors,” Stephen O’Brien, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, informed the UN Security Council on Thursday.
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