The UK is getting aid to Syria, development minister Andrew Mitchell has said, as he defended the government’s response to the earthquakes which hit the country. The tremor has added to the devastation caused by the civil war in Syria and local rescue groups have complained about the lack of international aid. More than 28,000 people have now died in Turkey and Syria after the quakes.
Mr Mitchell told the BBC the UK had helped Syria from “the beginning”. Speaking on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Mr Mitchell said the UK’s response included sending firefighters to Tukey and providing funding for major rescue operations in Syria. However, he did acknowledge that sending aid to Syria was “much more difficult than Turkey because it’s ungoverned space there”.
There has been a delay in getting aid to Syria, where years of conflict have ravaged parts of the country that remain under the control of rebels battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which is under Western sanctions. Some rebel-held areas in north-west Syria are already inhospitable and inaccessible after more than a decade of civil war. Currently, the UN is only authorised to use one route to deliver aid into north-western Syria, over the Turkish border into the province of Idlib.
In his interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Mr Mitchell was asked about the US’s decision to announce a 180-day exemption to its sanctions on Syria for “all transactions related to earthquake relief efforts”. When asked if the UK government would lift sanctions on Syria to speed up aid deliveries, Mr Mitchell said ministers would “do everything we can to make sure aid gets through to people who are suffering”. “Specifically here, where sanctions would hold us back in any way, we would seek to have them lifted,” the minister said. “But at the moment we are able to get what we want through. And that’s the key thing.”
The World Health Organization says about 26 million people across Syria and Turkey have been affected by the earthquake. In Syria alone, up to 5.3 million people may have been made homeless. Earlier this week, the UK government said it was giving £8m of support to Syria and Turkey, sending items such as tents and blankets and a team of medics.
The government also said it would give £3m in extra funding to aid the White Helmets, a volunteer organisation that operates in parts of Syria and in Turkey. Meanwhile, a UK appeal to help earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria has raised more than £60m in its first three days, including a £5m government donation. On Sunday, the chief of the United Nations aid agency, Martin Griffiths, said the international community had failed the people of north-west Syria. “They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Mr Griffiths said on Twitter. “My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.” He made the comments from the border between Turkey and Syria, which has seen only a few convoys of aid enter the rebel-held territory since the disaster.
