The problem with aid convoys
As flames leap in the background, a volunteer from the Syrian White Helmets holds aloft a bag of diapers. “From the UN”, he says. The blurry video shows the aftermath of the deadliest attack on aid workers yet in Syria. At least 20 people died while carrying aid in rural Aleppo, with both the corpses of Syrian Arab Red Crescent workers and the detritus of the humanitarian cargo burned or ruined.
With hopes for an end to the war dashed time and again, much hope has been pinned on these UN-led aid “inter-agency” convoys into mostly besieged and hard-to-reach areas, and the recent attack has brought them into further focus.
But are these convoys – carefully choreographed, breathlessly reported, and sometimes lifesaving – the best way to bring aid to a desperate population? Are they becoming more risky? Are they an overhyped symptom of a politicised aid system that has failed the people of Syria?
Or perhaps all of the above?
It’s time to ask some hard questions about how assistance is being delivered in Syria, and if it’s really helping that much at all.
Emergency aid largely consists of goods; goods travel on trucks; and truckers tend to move in convoy. That’s how it’s done.
But at the outset of the war in 2011, when all but the most astute observers predicted Bashar al-Assad would fall quickly, in the vein of a Muammar Gaddafi or a Hosni Mubarak, UN-led aid in Syria was focused on Iraqi and Palestinian refugees and there was nary an interagency convoy in sight. Some individual wings of the UN, namely the World Food Programme, did their own food deliveries.
The International Committee of the Red Cross began to expand operations, and the UN sometimes gave the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) goods to deliver.
In the spring of 2012, as the number of displaced and needy rose (people had started taking shelter in Damascus public gardens), the UN put together its first multi-agency convoy in an effort to increase efficiency and bring help to new parts of the country.
A former UN official, then based in Damascus and instrumental in these first efforts, told IRIN that even though these were only four or five-truck convoys, just carrying hygiene materials, they were still a pain to get off the ground.
Even in these early days, “the whole thing was very bureaucratic,” the official said.
“In the beginning, they [the al-Assad regime] didn’t want international staff going. Then they eventually agreed. It was a bit of a nightmare, and a lot of wasted time, but eventually we did it.”
Despite the wrangling required, the UN official said these convoys were useful in terms of building trust between the SARC (seen by many, but not this particular official, as leaning towards the regime) and the UN.
It showed the UN was “not just expecting the national organisations (like SARC) to go and put themselves on the front lines”, the official said, adding that international UN staff joined the convoys in part because it was believed they could serve as protection for the Syrian staff.
“At the time, I didn't think these convoys would be deliberately targeted,” the official added.
An expanding (and overhyped?) operation
Times have changed. The latest public update from OCHA, the UN’s aid coordination body, reports 115 inter-agency convoys to besieged or hard-to-reach areas this year, including 32 led by UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees.
These high-profile convoys are typically a few dozen trucks each. They carry mixed cargo, including food, household goods, hygiene and sanitary supplies from agencies like WFP and UNICEF. However, medicines and surgical supplies are frequently banned or removed by Syrian officials.
They’re almost always followed by press releases and a flurry of tweets, but despite their prominence and publicity it turns out UN-led inter-agency convoys, emblazoned with logos and accompanied by staff and 4x4s, are the exception in the overall Syria aid response, not the rule.
WFP reports that 3,000 truckloads a month (or an average of 100 per day) are on the move as part of their operation to supply food to four million people across the country.
Mercy Corps, likely the biggest supplier of cross-border relief from Turkey, reports that their monthly deliveries reach more than 600,000 people, which would amount to hundreds more per month in addition to WFP. Add the plethora of other aid groups and operations by ICRC and SARC separate from the UN, and the numbers rise even more.
At an absolute minimum, IRIN estimates that 35,000 truckloads of relief aid have been delivered around Syria in 2016. Continuing this back-of-the-envelope calculation, inter-agency convoys into besieged and hard-to-reach areas, at an average of 30 trucks each, represent less than 10 percent of total aid shipped, possibly much less.
As one senior UN official familiar with the Syria operation put it: "UN aid convoys have been diminished to symbolic (as opposed to meaningful and sufficient) means of supporting those in need, especially in besieged areas."
A tool of the political process?
It’s not just that the convoys are not enough.
Accusations that the UN is overly influenced by the al-Assad government have plagued the aid operation since its early days. But there’s more to the story.
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These days, the humanitarian task force negotiating convoy movements sits in Geneva, tied in with the International Syria Support Group.
Aid is meant to be neutral, impartial, and independent – three of the four guidinghumanitarian principles. Convoys that are only allowed in during negotiated ceasefires, or are linked to “evacuations” (such as Daraya), would struggle to approach these ideals. On 29 September, UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien told the UN Security Council, for example, that “tit-for-tat”, synchronised deliveries to Madaya and three other towns involved in two pairs of choreographed sieges were “unconscionable”.
"Feeding humanitarian blood, sweat and tears into the political machine"
A second former UN official in Damascus told IRIN that placing the humanitarian task force in Geneva, as a subsidiary body of a political forum, “makes it very clear it’s a fallacy to ever think independence, neutrality and the other [humanitarian] principles are there”.
And an analyst well placed to comment on Syria believes that operations like the ill-fated Aleppo convoy are “feeding humanitarian blood, sweat and tears into the political machine.” And that blood is almost always Syrian.
IRIN Report By Ben Parker and Annie Slemrod
