Monitoring Desk
SARMADA: The United Nations’ first delegation to visit rebel-held northwestern Syria since last week’s massive earthquake crossed over from Turkiye on Tuesday, as anger simmers at the slow response of the World body.
Over 35,000 people were killed when the quake devastated swathes of Syria and Turkiye on 6 February, at least 3,600 of them in the war-hit Syria.
Kenn Crossley, the World Food Program’s Syria director, told AFP that a multi-agency mission has gone this morning from the Turkiye side across the border crossing… It’s largely an assessment mission.
Delegation’s members
The delegation comprised David Carde, deputy regional humanitarian coordinator, and Sanjana Quazi, head of the United Nations’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Turkiye.
They went to a WFP center in Sarmada and held a forty-minute meeting with officials at the Bab al-Hawa crossing, the sole transit point on the Turkish border for United Nations’ aid deliveries to rebel-held areas.
Emergency teams and activists in the northwest have criticized the UN’s slow response to the earthquake in rebel-held parts, contrasting it with the huge humanitarian aid that have been reached to government-controlled airports.
