The UN says 11 lorries have driven through a reopened border crossing into rebel-held north-west Syria.
Image source, AFP via Getty ImagesThe first UN aid convoy has entered through a reopened border crossing into rebel-held north-western Syria, devastated by last week’s earthquake.
The UN said 11 lorries crossed from Turkey at Bab al-Salameh on Tuesday.
Many Syrians are angry over the lack of aid for the war-torn nation especially to rebel areas, after last week’s quakes in which more than 41,000 are known to have died in Turkey and Syria.
The UN and Syria’s government on Monday agreed to use two more crossings.
The other one is at al-Rai, also on the Turkish border. The UN said the crossings would initially be open for three months.
Two powerful earthquakes struck the south-eastern regions of neighbouring Turkey on 6 February early in the morning, when many people were asleep.
Hopes of finding any more survivors are fading.
Countries with friendly relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including Russia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, began flying supplies to government-controlled areas of Syria soon after the tremor.
But the opposition-controlled north-west – where some 4.1 million people were relying on humanitarian assistance to survive even before the disaster – received no aid deliveries from the UN via Turkey until Thursday.
The UN blamed damage to roads leading to the Bab al-Hawa crossing, which until now was the the only land route the UN Security Council has authorised it to use.
On Tuesday, the Syrian ambassador to the UN, Bassam al-Sabbagh, told the BBC’s Radio 4’s World Tonight programme that there would be be no discrimination over who was getting relief aid.
And he blamed the delay in opening more aid routes on what he called the “terrorist opposition” which controls the north-west.
In a separate development, on Monday night gunmen stormed a Syrian hospital caring for a baby girl who was born under the rubble of her family’s earthquake-shattered home, a hospital official was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
The official said the attackers beat the facility’s director – but denied reports on social media that they had sought to kidnap the baby named Aya.
Thousands of people have offered to adopt Aya – whose name means miracle in Arabic – who was born under the rubble of a collapsed building in the north-western town of Jindayris. When she was rescued, she was still connected to her mother by her umbilical cord.
Her mother, father and all four of her siblings died in the quake.