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19Dec16
U.N. Will Send Monitors to Aleppo, as Evacuations Resume
With Russia's backing, the United Nations Security Council voted on Monday to send United Nations observers to monitor evacuations from the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo and to report back regularly.
Russia had threatened to veto an earlier resolution proposed by France, which had sought to place the evacuations under United Nations supervision, but a compromise was reached on Sunday that would allow the monitors to observe after consultations with "interested parties." The resolution passed unanimously.
That could, in principle, give any number of groups on the ground – including Syrian soldiers and the Shiite militias fighting alongside them – the ability to block access. Fighters from the array of rebel groups, including extremists, could also block access to areas they control. Three questions now loom: Will Russia lean on Syria to allow safe and unimpeded access, as the resolution demands? How long will it take for the monitors to start working? And would they be in place before the evacuations are complete?
"Our objective is: immediately," Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said when asked by reporters after the vote when the monitors would start. "They need to get in there and be relevant on those green buses," the ones used to evacuate civilians and rebels.
The United Nations spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, could not say on Monday how many monitors would be deployed or how quickly they could be posted. Asked whether they could be deployed within the next 24 hours, when more evacuations are expected, Mr. Dujarric said: "It's dangerous for me to predict anything. Our colleagues on ground are trying to make this work."
Nor was there much clarity from a statement sent by the United Nations emergency relief chief, Stephen O'Brien. "We stand ready to scale up our presence and efforts across the entire city, in line with the resolution and international humanitarian law," the statement read. "This can be done immediately, but only if the parties live up to this resolution and their most basic legal obligations."
Hours after the vote, the United Nations envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said he would convene political talks among Syrian government and opposition groups starting Feb. 8. Citing the Security Council deal, he said, "It is vital to build on this initial momentum."
The United Nations says it has about 100 staff members in Aleppo, mostly Syrian citizens, and several hundred others in nearby Syrian cities. Officials with the organization have said they were denied permission to observe evacuations. As many as 50,000 civilians may still be stuck in the area, according to humanitarian groups, although a precise figure is all but impossible to determine.
"After so many delaying tactics and obstruction, this resolution should finally allow the full respect of international humanitarian law in Syria," President François Hollande of France said in a statement. "It should also pave the way for a cease-fire and negotiate a political solution that is much awaited by the Syrian people and the entire international community."
The extent to which the Syrian government will cooperate with the monitoring is unclear, though Russia is a principal military backer of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
After days of delays and sporadic violence, the evacuation of civilians and fighters from besieged communities in Syria resumed Sunday night, with convoys taking people out of eastern Aleppo and two nearby Shiite villages.
As of Monday afternoon, 20,000 people had been removed from the last rebel-held part of Aleppo, the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said in a post on Twitter.
Among those evacuated to a rebel-held area west of the city was Bana al-Abed, a 7-year-old girl whose Twitter posts with her mother throughout the siege by government forces helped draw attention to the plight of civilians.
Opposition activists posted videos and photographs of the girl and her mother on Monday after they arrived in rebel-held territory.
The evacuation of more than 2,000 sick and wounded people from two Shiite villages that have been surrounded by Sunni insurgents for years also began Monday. The villages, Fouaa and Kfarya, were not originally part of the agreement but were added after pro-government gunmen prevented buses from removing people from eastern Aleppo last week. Ten buses carrying civilians from the villages left on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, and local journalists posted online videos of their arrival in another government-held area.
Also added to the agreement was the evacuation of two rebel-held villages near the border with Lebanon, Zabadani and Madaya, that have long been surrounded by government forces.
The evacuation deal, brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran, was intended to relieve one of the more crushing aspects of Syria's war: the practice by both sides of besieging their opponents and bombarding their communities.
The agreement, and an accompanying cease-fire, has proceeded haltingly since it began on Wednesday, with gunfire on the route repeatedly stopping convoys.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the Syrian government, said five buses that had been held up by pro-government forces for hours were allowed to leave eastern Aleppo before midnight on Sunday.
The eastern part of Aleppo, the remaining rebel-held area of the city, has been surrounded by government forces for months and subjected to frequent airstrikes that have killed hundreds of people and have reduced neighborhoods to rubble.
If the evacuations continue without interruption, the removal of the remaining residents of eastern Aleppo will put the entire city under Mr. Assad's control and mark a turning point in the war.
Aleppo was once the largest city in Syria and was its industrial hub before the war. Its fall would leave rebels in control of only smaller towns and rural areas.
The jihadists of the Islamic State, who oppose both the government and the rebels, still hold significant territory farther east, including the city of Raqqa, their de facto capital.
[Source: By Ben Hubbard and Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, Beirut, 19Dec16]
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