Jura The idiot
General
according to The Wall Street Journal
U.N. Was Warned of Airstrikes Before Ill-Fated Convoy Left
(I originally noticed at gazeta.ru: )
U.N. Was Warned of Airstrikes Before Ill-Fated Convoy Left
source:‘Airstrikes are not a reason to stop the convoy,’ U.N. official wrote after opposition warned of danger from Syrian government
United Nations officials went ahead with an ill-fated aid delivery to a rebel-held town in northern Syria Monday despite warnings by their own staff and Western-backed rebels that the area wasn’t safe, according to communications seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Airstrikes Monday night on the town of Urem al-Kubra just outside the city of Aleppo destroyed 18 of the 31 trucks in the convoy and accompanying them. The U.S. on Tuesday , the Syrian regime’s key international ally.
Monday’s convoy to Urem al-Kubra and another that went to a rebel-held town in central Homs province were during the weeklong cease-fire. Western officials hailed the trucks’ arrival in the town as proof of the deal’s potential success—until they were hit
On Sunday, Syrian opposition members warned U.N. officials against deliveries to the rebel-held side of Aleppo, reporting the government was violating the cease-fire in and around the city, noting Urem al-Kubra. A U.N. official acknowledged the violations in a response.
“The airstrikes are not a reason to stop the convoy,” an official from the U.N. Special Envoy to Syria’s office replied on Sunday, conveying what the official said was the position of a representative of the U.N. Department of Political Affairs and suggesting that some people around the special envoy disagreed with that stance.
The attacks were part of a wave of regime airstrikes on Aleppo province that began immediately after the Damascus government announced Monday evening that the one-week truce brokered by the U.S. and Russia had expired.
The exchange of messages revealed divisions between Damascus-based U.N. agencies over the risk of aid delivery to Aleppo province, as well as a degree of distrust of the Syrian government.
The messages show U.N. officials decided to proceed even though the Syrian regime was violating the cease-fire—violations U.N. officials have been reticent to acknowledge publicly even as they did so in private messages.
A U.N. official said Tuesday that the convoy came from the government-held side of the divided city of Aleppo and a day earlier officials said the regime had approved it, making the airstrike on the aid trucks all the more perplexing.
“The safety of convoys traveling through government areas is the responsibility of the government,” a second U.N. official, based in Damascus, wrote to a senior opposition member in a separate exchange of messages on Sunday. The official was speaking of rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo city, including Urem al-Kubra. “If [rebels] permit entrance, we will have all the sufficient guarantees to stop bombing from the government side.”
Moscow on Tuesday denied that it or the Syrian air force had struck the convoy in Urem al-Kubra, which was a joint mission of the U.N. and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.
After the truce brought days of relative calm, the Syrian government and its Russian allies restarted airstrikes on Aleppo on Sunday, angered by errant airstrikes on the Syrian military by the U.S.-led coalition in Deir Ezzour the previous day.
Washington has cast the delivery of humanitarian aid to rebel-held areas—specifically some 300,000 people in the besieged rebel-held side of Aleppo city—as one of the first goals of the cease-fire deal, to be followed by military cooperation with Moscow to take on extremist groups such as Islamic State and the Syrian Conquest Front.
The Syrian government has cut off supplies to rebel-held areas, with staples such as flour and medicine unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
Aleppo was Syria’s largest city and its economic heartland before the conflict, but has seen some of the worst fighting between rebels and government forces in a battle observers say will determine the outcome of the war.
The U.N. has been criticized in the past for delivering most of its humanitarian aid to government-controlled areas while regime forces often hamper deliveries to opposition territory, sometimes blocking staples such as flour. Members of the opposition said U.N. officials said they were eager to deliver aid to Aleppo to rebuff these criticisms.
A representative of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and a spokeswoman for the office of U.N. Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said they don’t comment on leaked staff correspondence.
Washington had hoped a successful truce could clinch a larger political deal to end the Syrian war, now in its sixth year with some 400,000 dead, according to U.N. estimates.
(I originally noticed at gazeta.ru: )
