Over 140 aid trucks have entered rebel-held Syria
More than 140 trucks carrying desperately-needed aid have crossed into rebel-held northwestern Syria from Turkey since a giant earthquake devastated the region last week, the United Nations said on Friday. "Since February 9 up to last night, we had a total of 143 trucks going through the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salama border crossings," Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, told reporters in Geneva. "The movements continue today. They continue over the weekend and will continue every day for as long as the needs are there." Eleven days after the quake that killed more than 41,000 people in Turkey and Syria, the situation in Syria's rebel-held northwest remains dire due to the slow arrival of aid to a region ravaged by years of conflict. Before the earthquake struck, almost all the crucial humanitarian aid for the more than four million people living there was delivered through just one crossing, Bab al-Hawa. Operations there were temporarily disrupted by the quake damage. It took four days to get aid moving across that border crossing again, and earlier this week, Damascus agreed to allow the UN to open two further border crossings to help bring in more aid. "We expect to have trucks crossing every single day," Laerke said. So far, aid has flowed through the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salama crossings but no trucks have gone through the third crossing, Al Raee, he said. "That doesn't mean that it is not going to come, but it is a bit further away from the hub and the UN monitoring mechanism that is inspecting all of the aid that is coming through," he said. Laerke said the trucks that have crossed since the quake have been carrying "a multitude of aid" from six UN agencies: the International Organisation for Migration, the UN refugee agency UNHCR, the UN Population Fund, the UN children's agency Unicef, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organisation. "Aid has so far included tents, non-food items, such as mattresses and blankets, winter clothes, cholera testing kits, essential medicines and World Food Programme food," he said. (AFP)