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Syria
Employees of a pharmaceutical factory in Homs, central Syria check stock of hydroxychloroquine, used in the country to prevent or cure COVID-19, on April 28, 2020. Photo: Louai Behsara / AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A senior Kurdish official from northeast Syria's administration on Wednesday said it had not yet received any coronavirus-related aid the World Health Organization (WHO) reported it had delivered to the region on May 11.
WHO tweeted on Monday that it “managed to deliver a 30-ton medical shipment by road to #Al_Qamishli in North-East Syria (NES) as a part of @WHO response to the emergency health needs of the most vulnerable populations,” but had not specified whether the aid had been sent to facilities under the control of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria - also known by the NES acronym - or to a hospital controlled by the Syrian regime.
Jwan Mustafa, co-chair of the area's autonomous administration health board, said it had not yet received any amount of the shipment.
“To this moment, we have not received any amount of the reported 30 tons of aid,” Mustafa told Rudaw English on Wednesday. “We have not been told when and how much of it will be given to us.”
However, a WHO spokesperson told Rudaw English later on Wednesday that the shipment of "exclusively medical equipment" is currently being held at warehouses in the area with its contents "under inventory."
"This equipment will be distributed to functional health facilities in NES (northeast Syria)," including the National Hospitals of Kisra, Qamishli, Raqqa, as well as Keira in Rural Deir ez-Zor, Manbij Hospital, Hasaka's health department, and Qamishli's National Hospital," said the spokesperson, who did not want to be named.
"Staff availability and capacity within the hospitals were the taken into account when planning supply distribution," they added.
All the locations listed by the WHO spokesperson, with the exception of the Qamishli National Hospital, are under autonomous administration control, Mustafa told Rudaw English on Wednesday.
The administration has been told by WHO that the locations would receive their allocations of the shipment "in the coming days," Mustafa added.
The delivery was "the first road shipment in two years" to northeast Syria, Akjemal Magtyamova, WHO representative to Syria, said on Monday.
The shipment "contains lifesaving medical equipment such as incubators, ventilators, ICU beds & other vital medical equipment and supplies needed to serve the population in the area,” according to another tweet by the organization.
Three cases of COVID-19 have so far been confirmed by the NES authorities; it is unclear if these incidences figure into the nationwide total of 45 cases confirmed by the Syrian regime.
Another NES official said earlier this month that the administration has not been receiving enough international help to fight the novel coronavirus.
“No one is helping us… we have not received any aid from international organizations,” NES Foreign Relations Department co-chair Abdulkarim Omar told Rudaw on May 5.
According to Omar, the only aid received had been from Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani, who sent four polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines needed to test samples for the virus last month.
Home to hundreds of thousands of displaced people, northeast Syria has mainly depended on the Semalka border crossing, connecting northeast Syria with the Kurdistan Region, for humanitarian aid deliveries. It was closed on March 1 to stem the spread of COVID-19, and only reopened on April 20.
The area, known to Kurds as Rojava, used to receive international aid through al-Yarubiya border crossing with Iraq, but was left out of a January 2020 UN Security Council vote to allow the passage of humanitarian provisions into Syria due to Russian opposition.
The Kurdish-controlled northeast was deprived of cross-border channels for UN medical assistance after Russia blocked proposals to renew the mandate for humanitarian aid to be routed through the border with Iraq, insisting that provisions instead come through Damascus, where it can be controlled and conditioned by the Syrian government.
WHO submitted a memo to the Security Council in late April, including a call from aid groups working with the UN to grant urgent permission for aid deliveries through al-Yarubiya.
However, an updated version of the memo no longer included the direct appeal to reopen the border crossing between Iraq and northeast Syria.
In mid-April, WHO announced that a shipment of 20 tons of "medical supplies such as incubators, ventilators, and personal protective equipment" had been sent to the northeast Syrian city of Qamishli.
A WHO communications officer said that the “majority” of that shipment would go to the self-administration controlled area - but local monitor the Rojava Information Center, citing the Kurdish Red Crescent, reported that all of the aid shipment had been sent to the city's National Hospital, controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Damascus.
With two of the NES' three reported COVID-19 cases remaining active, the administration on Tuesday extended its lockdown until after Eid in late May - though its restrictions only apply at night, from 7 pm to 6 am.
Additional reporting by Yasmine Mosimann
Updated at 3:28 pm
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