Syria Extends Post-Quake Aid Access

Facts

• On Saturday, Syria agreed to extend the authorization for the UN to utilize two additional border crossings for post-earthquake humanitarian assistance for three additional months.¹
• Syria's ambassador to the UN, Bassam Sabbagh, said the decision to open the border crossings at Bab al-Salameh and al-Rai until Aug. 13 was taken "to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to all those in need in all Syria."²
• Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad opened the Bab al-Salameh and al-Rai crossings for three months starting on Feb. 13 to allow aid to flow into Syria's rebel-held Idlib governorate — a week after a powerful earthquake hit southern Turkey and northern Syria.³
• The Syrian government had long resisted cross-border aid deliveries to rebel areas along the Turkish border, a stance that reportedly stalled immediate relief and rescue efforts in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.¹
• The Feb. 6 earthquake killed over 50K people in Turkey and more than 7K in Syria. Out of over 9M directly affected, 5.2M still require humanitarian assistance.⁴
• The UN already has a Security Council mandate to use the Bab Al-Hawa border crossing since 2014 to deliver aid to Idlib in the country's north-west, where at least 4M people are already affected by the 12-year-long civil war.⁵

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²Reuters, ³VOA, ⁴Euronews, and ⁵Middle East Monitor.

Narratives

• Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by Amnesty International. Since the outbreak of Syria's civil war, Bashar al-Assad's regime has consistently made aid delivery more difficult and, in many cases, sabotaged the process altogether. Cross-border aid is one of the only effective ways of circumventing the government's malicious intentions and helping people affected by the devastating earthquake.
• Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by The Cradle. The Syrian government continues to tolerate aid deliveries into regions of Syria controlled by extremists. This runs directly against international regulations. Though the government wants to help all Syrians, the areas occupied by rebel forces take advantage of the cross-border mechanism to steal humanitarian aid for themselves and, at times, to sell it for higher prices.