UN to dispatch first food airdrops into Syria

The UN will make its first airdrops of food to tens of thousands of Syrian civilians over the next few days and is aiming to deliver aid to all of the country’s 18 besieged areas within a week.

Jan Egeland, the head of the UN task force on humanitarian access to Syria, said on Thursday that the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) had a “concrete plan” for using airdrops to get food to the city of Deir ez-Zor, where 200,000 people surrounded by Islamic State militants are enduring severe food shortages and rapidly deteriorating conditions. 

Egeland provided no details of the aerial operation but said airdrops were the only way to reach “the poor people inside Deir ez-Zor”. Unverified reports have suggested that up to 20 people in the city have already died of starvation. Speaking to reporters in Geneva a day after UN aid convoys reached five areas – some besieged by government forces and others by rebels – he added: “It’s a complicated operation and would be in many ways the first of its kind.”

Deir ez-Zor, which lies in the province of the same name in eastern Syria, links Isis’ de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa with territory controlled by the militant group in neighbouring Iraq. Russian cargo planes reportedly delivered tens of tonnes of humanitarian aid to regime-held neighbourhoods in the city last month.

Egeland, who is the special adviser to the UN’s Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said he was confident aid would reach those in other cut-off regions within the next few days.

Speaking after a three-hour meeting of representatives from the 17-nation International Syria Support Group (ISSG), he said: “We discussed the next phase, which is to reach all of the remaining besieged areas of Syria. And we should be able to do [so] before the next meeting, which will be in a week.”

Egeland said many member states had pledged support for the attempt to reach Deir ez-Zor, adding there had been “excellent cooperation” between Russia and the US.

But although he noted that UN trucks had managed to deliver life-saving food and medical supplies to 80,000 people in five besieged areas in the previous 24 hours, Egeland repeated calls for greater access to more than 4 million people in hard-to-reach areas of Syria. 

“The people of Syria ... have waited too long for relief,” he said.

The announcement of UN airdrops follows weeks of speculation and mounting international pressure for more to be done to reach starving Syrian civilians.