UN prepares aid to Sweida after Syrian government green light

DAMASCUS (Reuters) -The United Nations is preparing to send a convoy of humanitarian aid to Syria’s southern province of Sweida, three aid officials told Reuters, after days of bloodshed left hundreds dead and displaced an estimated 175,000 people.

The preparations began after Syria’s foreign ministry granted U.N. aid agencies a green light to access Sweida directly, according to correspondence seen by Reuters, following three deliveries of U.N. aid to the province carried out by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

The new U.N. convoy will include food and other supplies, according to Marianne Ward, head of the U.N.’s World Food Programme in Syria.

“We’re organising a convoy with a variety of different U.N. agencies’ support, which we expect will be the beginning of blanket access” to vulnerable communities, Ward told Reuters.

The violence in Sweida began on July 13, when local factions from the Druze – a minority offshoot of Islam – clashed with Bedouin tribal fighters.

Syria’s government sent in troops to quell the fighting, but the clashes intensified, with more than 1,000 people killed, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a war monitor.

A fragile ceasefire brokered by the U.S. brought calm nearly a week later, but residents of Sweida told Reuters that electricity, food, medicine and water all remained scarce.

More than 52,000 people had also fled to the neighbouring province of Daraa.

“Essentially anyone who lives in Sweida now needs support, and anybody who has left Sweida to go to Daraa needs support,” Ward said in an interview in Damascus.

The WFP has already sent nearly 250 metric tons of wheat flour to bakeries in Sweida and ready-to-eat meals for 50,000 people in the province, as well as food support to 10,000 people in Daraa.

But sustained tensions in the province had prevented aid groups from opening a regular route to Sweida in the days leading up to the government’s green light, humanitarian sources said.

Ward said U.N. agencies needed a stable ceasefire to produce a permanent calm to reach Sweida residents directly.

“We can’t just drop it and run away – we have to be able to bring it and provide it to those people who need it most,” Ward said.

(Reporting by Khalil Ashawi and Maya Gebeily)