GENEVA — More than 100 trucks laden with emergency food and medicine began deliveries Wednesday to tens of thousands of desperate Syrians in five locations besieged for months by the civil war, United Nations officials and relief workers reported.
The deliveries were the first significant aid to the afflicted civilians under a diplomatic arrangement negotiated during a meeting in Munich last week by the so-called International Syria Support Group of 17 nations and finalized Tuesday between the UN and the Syrian government, which had blocked access to the locations.
International aid agencies had loaded 115 trucks with food and medical supplies for 100,000 people in the western towns of Madaya and Zabadani, the northwestern towns of Fouaa and Kfarya, and the Damascus suburb of Moadhamiyeh. The trucks started moving in convoys Wednesday. and By evening at least some of them had reached all but Fouaa and Kfarya, relief workers and independent monitors said.
The convoy to Madaya was the first delivery in nearly a month to that town, where photographs of residents who starved to death have joined the list of iconic images of the five-year-old Syrian war. UN officials say ambulances of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent have made frequent visits and evacuated some of the most urgent cases.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group with a network of activists in Syria, reported that a Syrian Arab Red Crescent delegation had entered Madaya early Wednesday with a mobile clinic to treat residents who have been seriously wounded in bombings and other attacks.
The aid deliveries began as members of the International Syria Support Group, made up of countries closely involved in the Syrian conflict, including the United States and Russia, prepared to convene a meeting of its humanitarian task force in Geneva on Thursday to discuss expanding the aid deliveries to hundreds of thousands of people marooned in at least 15 besieged towns and inaccessible areas.
The group is seeking what it has described as a “cessation of hostilities’’ in the war to create the basis for a political settlement between President Bashar Assad and his adversaries, but there has been little indication that any of the antagonists or their backers are ready to halt fighting.
New York Times
