PHOTO: State media’s image of Wednesday meetings between Deputy Foreign Minister Feisal al-Mikdad and the World Food Program’s Jakob Kern


Amid continuing regime sieges on Syria’s opposition areas, Deputy Foreign Minister Feisal al-Mikdad has received the new representative of the World Food Program in Syria, Jakob Kern.

According to State news agency SANA, “The two sides discussed means to boost cooperation in order to deliver food aid to more needy people, with Mikdad asserting that the Syrian government will continue to provide facilitations to the WFO to ensure delivering humanitarian aid to those who need it and who were affected by terrorist acts.”

UN officials said on Wednesday that 4.6 million people inside Syria are in hard-to-reach and besieged areas and that almost 500,000 — almost all cut off by the Syrian military or the Islamic State — are at threat of starvation.

The head of the UN’s humanitarian operations, Stephen O’Brien, said that only 620,000 of those threatened had been reached in 2015. Of 113 requests to the regime for approval of inter-agency aid convoys, only 10% were completed. Another 10% were approved “in principle” but never received final acceptance.

In one case, that of Madaya in Damascus Province, about 70 people have reportedly died from starvation since December 1. The town has been cut off by the Syrian military since last July, with the Assad regime finally approving three aid convoys earlier this month after international attention to the crisis.

The head of the World Health Organisation in Damascus, Elizabeth Hoff, confirmed that the regime is preventing medical teams from visiting the besieged town of Madaya. She told the special briefing in Geneva that she has sent repeated requests to the Syrian Health Ministry of Health asking for medical teams to be allowed entry, but she has not received approval.

Mikdad did not refer to the sieges in his Wednesday meeting with Kern. Instead, he “stressed the need for the UN and its organizations to work towards ending the unjustifiable unilateral sanctions imposed by Western states on Syria, as these sanctions harm the Syrian people and have a negative impact on their daily lives in health, nutrition, and humane terms”.