On Friday, the United Nations Security Council appeared to be headed for a showdown over whether to approve the continuation of U.N. aid deliveries from Turkey to the approximately 4 million residents of opposition-controlled northwest Syria for another six or twelve months.
On Sunday, the eight-year-old aid program’s U.N. mandate comes to an end. The 15-member council decided to meet again on Friday for additional discussions following negotiations on Thursday evening that put Russia against the United States and Britain.
According to Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, the country only wants to extend the aid programme for another six months before requesting that the council pass a new resolution to do so.
U.S.: ‘Six months ends in January, right in the heart of winter, which is the very worst period.’ Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the ambassador to the UN, told reporters.
Thomas-Greenfield, who visited the Turkish border crossing last month to evaluate the aid operation, said that a six-month resolution ‘does not provide the certainty and the confidence that the Syrian refugees require and the NGOs (aid groups) require to continue to plan for and provide for support.’
A proposed compromise wording that was distributed late on Thursday and written by Ireland and Norway would extend the aid operation for another year and require the council to approve a new resolution if it were to expire after six months.
Geraldine Byrne Nason, the ambassador for Ireland to the United Nations, told reporters that she would work through the night and ‘hopefully come back in the morning with a solution.’
For numerous years, there has been controversy surrounding the Security Council vote on the cross-border aid operation.
2014 saw the Security Council approve shipments of humanitarian aid from Iraq, Jordan, and two locations in Turkey into Syria’s opposition-held regions. However, the number of possible border points has been reduced to only one by the veto powers Russia and China.
We cannot give up on the people of Syria, said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in an appeal to the council last month to extend its approval of aid shipments from Turkey into northwest Syria.
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