The Bashar Assad regime's grip on aid agencies in Syria must be addressed, said a recent report underlining that Syrian regime forces control distribution and one pro-regime militia has a contract to rebuild a city that it destroyed.
According to The Guardian, the 70-page "Rescuing Aid in Syria" report, which was released by the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and based on interviews with United Nations officials and humanitarian workers in Syria, said the Assad regime's manipulation of aid in Syria is a unique and persistent form of control that needs to be urgently addressed.
"There aren’t many situations in our history, where someone who has committed mass atrocities to the level that the Assad government has, stays in power and controls the aid apparatus," said the author, Natasha Hall.
According to the report, the regime has such a tight grip on aid groups’ access, including through visa approvals, that it had become normalized for relatives of senior regime officials to have jobs within U.N. bodies.
At a time when the relations are warming between the Assad regime and many regional Arab states, including Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Algeria, the report said there has been an increase in threats, arbitrary detentions and torture of Syrian aid staff in the past year.
"The threat of coercion and murder hanging over aid workers prevents independent monitoring of U.N. agencies and NGOs," the report said.
"If the Assad government is going to stay in place, which it seems a lot of governments are resigned to, this needs to be sorted out, because aid is probably going to continue to go into this hostile environment," Hall said.
The report also underlined the fact that figures close to the regime and directly responsible for human rights violations are benefiting.
The report found Mohamad Hamsho, a businessperson close to the Fourth Division, an elite army unit, and Assad's brother, Maher Assad, had won U.N. procurement contracts to strip metals in areas retaken by the regime and rework them for sale at their Hadeed Metal Manufacturing Company.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) allegedly contracted the Aleppo Defenders Legion, a pro-regime militia responsible for forcibly displacing residents, to clear rubble and rehabilitate the city they helped destroy, as outlined also by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Sara Kayyali, HRW’s Syria researcher, said: "The U.N. did zero human rights due diligence when contracting people; we’re not talking about them contracting for tens of thousands of dollars, we’re talking about millions of dollars that are going to ... companies owned by individuals who we know have committed human rights violations.
"When you consider the U.N. is one of the primary ways that money is going into Syria ... (and) plays a huge role in revitalizing the economy, it’s playing into the hands of (the regime’s) war economy."
The report also said that "the manipulation of aid had grown in the past decade of war, and a thorough audit and evaluation of aid in Syria was necessary," underlining the fact that when aid was transported across lines of conflict or control, in both northwest and eastern Syria, known as cross-line shipments, there have been thefts, and medical equipment has been distributed haphazardly.
Accordingly, only two cross-line convoys carrying 43,500 food portions each made it to opposition-controlled northwestern Syria between August and December last year compared with 1.3 million rations delivered from Turkey in November alone. Supplies took four months to reach people in need as they sat in warehouses because the regime would not allow opposition-linked nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to distribute them, Hall said.
Many of Syria's nearly 3 million displaced people face dire winter conditions with a brutal snowstorm hammering the country's northwestern region, as the United Nations has urged the international community to do more to protect them.
The Idlib region, where 2.8 million displaced live, is the last Syrian enclave to oppose the regime in Damascus. Humanitarian aid reaches them mainly through the Turkey-Syria border under special U.N. authorization free from Damascus interference, which expires in July.
Idlib falls within a de-escalation zone forged under an agreement between Turkey and Russia in March 2020. However, the Syrian regime has consistently violated the terms of the cease-fire, launching frequent attacks inside the de-escalation zone.