Humanitarianism

For three long days following last week’s earthquake in Southern Türkiye, thousands of people in northwest Syria lay trapped under rubble, with no help from the UN. The road through Türkiye to the border crossing between southern Türkiye and northwest Syria, Bab al-Hawa, was damaged. Although, to quote the International Crisis Group’s Syria Analyst Dareen Khalifa, ‘there are a million routes to Syria’, Bab al-Hawa was the only crossing that – in January – the Security Council had authorised the UN to use. The Assad regime meanwhile was not allowing sufficient aid deliveries into opposition-held northwest Syria from Damascus. So the UN waited, as people died. In shattered cities in northwest Syria, amongst the rubble, survivors flew UN flags upside down in disgust. One image shows the words ‘we are dead, thank you for letting us down’ scrawled across a collapsed slab in a sea of broken concrete. In a striking admission, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said ‘we have…