WASHINGTON – Only one route remains open to international convoys carrying food, water and other aid to more than a million Syrians besieged by the civil war. Now, officials warn, Russia could try to shut it down or use it as a bargaining chip with world powers in another war, some 1,000 miles away in Ukraine.
Diplomats and experts say closing the corridor, on the Bab al-Hawa border with Turkey, will almost certainly force thousands of people out of Syria. That will only worsen one refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East has been considered the largest in the world since the Second World War.
The United Nations Security Council, where Russia has a strong veto, will vote in July on whether to keep the aid route open. But the corridor seems to have been caught in the fallout from the war in Ukraine and competitive interests of Russia and the United States.
“The war in Ukraine is having wide-ranging impacts on Syria – as well as the entire region and the world,” Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said in an interview on Sunday. this month in Washington.
Mr. Safadi said Jordan was carefully watching how Russia would approach the vote. More than a million Syrian refugees already live in Jordan, he said, and mediating a peace deal in Syria’s 11-year civil war “will certainly require an agreement between the US and Russia”.
“With the dynamics right now,” he said, “the consequences can be dire for the living conditions of Syrian refugees and displaced people.”
Using its veto in the Security Council, Russia helped close three other humanitarian corridors entered Syria in 2020 and last year agreed to retain a site in Bab al-Hawa only after intense negotiations with the United States. It has defended the closure of roads as needed to maintain Syria’s sovereignty and promoted the distribution of aid with the approval of President Bashar al-Assad’s government rather than through the United Nations.
Russia has been one of al-Assad’s benefactors during Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011, and aid has largely gone to rebel-held areas. The route from Bab al-Hawa leads to Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, one of the last areas of rebel-held territory in the country and an area that has become a military haven. Al Qaeda-linked extremist organization.
An international pressure campaign to keep the route open is currently underway. The United States is chairing the Security Council this month and has hold a series of touching meetings about the plight of Syrians who have become homeless or need assistance to survive.
Russia’s deputy UN ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said Moscow has not yet decided how it will vote. But in an interview on Friday, he said that under the current system, the aid is very vulnerable to extremists in Idlib.
“I’m not denying that it’s also for refugees, but terrorist groups – they benefit from this,” he said, adding that extremists had attacked the delivery people.
Mr. Polyanskiy would not discuss talks to keep the corridor open, except to say that talks between Russia and the United States have stalled, due to “current geopolitical circumstances”.
“Honestly, we don’t have much to make us optimistic at this stage,” he said.
However, three foreign diplomats said Russia had sent vague signals that it might try to use the vote to gain concessions in its confrontation with Ukraine. The US and European countries have imposed a variety of sanctions on Russia to punish it for its aggression in its neighbour.
Diplomats will not describe the signals in detail and say that Moscow has stopped short of directly tying the fate of the corridor to the war in Ukraine. But they say they believe Moscow will rely on countries that will be directly affected by the new wave of refugees for help in evading sanctions.
One of the diplomats also predicted Russia would counter accusations that its invasion violated Ukraine’s sovereignty by accusing the aid convoys of being an infringement on Syria’s territorial integrity.
Separately, a senior US diplomat said the US and other Security Council nations would send “a clear message” to Moscow calling for the route to be closed but there was no guarantee that it would. will be noticed. The diplomats all spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
“The Russians have never recognized that Bab al-Hawa is really important and we need to make it public,” said Sherine Tadros, Amnesty International’s head of office at the United Nations. “It’s just part of their strategy to walk away, walk away, walk away. And this is always subject to a lot of back-dealing.”
“That’s what’s also really sad – the way they play with people’s lives,” added Ms Tadros.
One the vast majority of Syrian refugees lives in Turkey, where officials have warned for years that the diaspora is pushing the country to a breaking point.
Turkey is preparing for what Russia might do, according to two people familiar with the internal discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe them. Both said they expect the route to be part of diplomatic dialogues with Moscow on Ukraine.
Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is supplying Ukraine with weapons and banned Moscow’s warships from the strategic waterways leading from the Black Sea. But this month, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey signal that the country will protest allowed Sweden and Finland to join NATO, citing security concerns. Moscow has long demanded that the military alliance stop expanding into Russia’s borders.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is preventing a European Union Russia’s oil embargo to combat rising energy prices. Hungary has deported tens of thousands of refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries but has received more than 600,000 Ukrainians this year.
Jordan, has relations with both Russia and the United States, has tried to avoid getting dragged into a deadlock over Ukraine and is instead urging the Biden administration to revive talks to end the civil war in Syria. The conflict in Ukraine has created “more deadlocks,” Safadi said.
“In our view, this situation is very dangerous because it only increases the suffering of the Syrian people,” he said in the interview. Jordan is one of a number of Middle Eastern countries that have recently resumed relations with Mr. al-Assad’s government, despite objections from Washington.
The Syrian Civil War has forced 5.7 million people leave their country. About 6.7 million Ukrainians have fled their country since the Russian invasion.
The looming global food shortage, partly due to disruptions in wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia as a result of the invasion, is expected to cause more suffering.
“Suppose we are going to have a humanitarian crisis because of food shortages,” Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told journalists in Washington this month when asked about the growing number of refugees in Europe. “Then the situation can become very, very difficult to manage.”
In one announced on ThursdayThe Kremlin said it would help prevent food shortages if the West eases sanctions. President Vladimir V. Putin “emphasized that the Russian Federation is ready to make a significant contribution to overcoming the food crisis through grain and fertilizer exports, provided that the restrictions are politically motivated from the Western West is dismantled,” the statement read. after a phone call between Putin and Draghi on Thursday.
Hundreds of thousands Refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa arrive in Italy during the crisis that culminated in 2015 when 1.3 million people fled to Europe. In Washington, Mr. Draghi said Italy has received nearly 120,000 Ukrainians this year. But he said the number of Syrians staying in his country, rather than moving elsewhere in Europe, was “insignificant.”
At an international donor conference this month in Brussels, US pledges to send nearly 808 million dollars to support humanitarian needs in Syria – one of the largest US donations since the war began. UN Refugee Agency raised $6.7 billion at the Syria support conference this year and beyond, even though they asked for 10.5 billion dollars just for 2022.
Announcing the aid, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Ambassador to the United Nations, said food shortages had made humanitarian aid to Syria “particularly important this year”. Without mentioning Russia, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield called the July vote on the bailout roadmap a “matter of life and death”.
Mr. Polyanskiy, the Russian diplomat, said that unofficial borders to Syria could allow aid to continue. “Of course it will be difficult to deliver UN aid through these points, but that doesn’t mean these intersections won’t work,” he said.
The issue also draws comparisons between Russia’s support for a brutal government in Syria and Putin’s own aggressive actions in Ukraine.
“No one has watched Putin’s atrocities in Syria over the past decade so it’s surprising that he is starving and bombarding Ukrainians – just as he is starving and shooting Syrians,” said Senator Bob Menendez. , a Democrat of New Jersey and the Chairman of the State Senate. Relations Committee.
