GENEVA: Providing humanitarian aid in war-ravaged Syria looks set to shift increasingly away from emergency, life-saving assistance towards rehabilitating devastated areas to help Syrians return home, the head of the Red Cross said on Wednesday.
Peter Maurer told reporters in Geneva that the conflict appeared to be entering a new stage, with fewer “big-battle” moments and perhaps even a chance to provide displaced Syrians with a sense of normalcy after seven years of devastating violence.
“Syria to us looks very different from Syria last year or from Syria two years ago,” Maurer said.
Syria has been torn apart a war that has left more than 350,000 people dead and displaced millions.
But Maurer said that as the situation in many parts of the country appears to be stabilising, he expected to see a shift away from a pure focus on emergency assistance towards reestablishing services in areas people want to return to.
“For us it is just important that we get the rehabilitation thing going,” he said. Maurer pointed out that Syria now appeared to be split into fairly clearly defined territories, and said the “big actors” seemed ready to work towards “consensus to stop the war and to go into a phase of more tranquillity.”
“I have the impression we are at a little bit of a threshold moment,” he said, adding that he believed “we are entering the post-big battle era.”
The Damascus regime has retaken large parts of Syria since 2015 with Russia’s backing, but opposition groups with Western backing still control most of the northern Idlib province. Turkey also controls an area in the north after launching an operation into Syria in January to root out the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia in the Afrin enclave.
Maurer acknowledged that the situation could still spiral in a “dangerous” direction.
But he said his recent visits to Moscow and other capitals had convinced him there was now a “minimal consensus” to stabilise the country. Despite a relative calm in a number of places across the country, Maurer stressed that “humanitarian assistance (must) continue to go into Syria, because... there are a lot of humanitarian needs.”
But he said the nature of the assistance would evolve in many places away from pure emergency assistance towards “protection activities”.
Such activities include helping reestablish basic services, assisting people to find lost family members and also help provide protection to avoid communities coming under attack. ICRC said it had received some 13,000 tracing requests from people looking for loved ones since the start of the conflict.
— AFP
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