UN Humanitarian Aid. How did the Assad regime seize it and exploit it to serve its agenda?

The documentary, broadcast by Al-Jazeera, revealed the ways in which the Syrian regime exploited humanitarian aid during the years of war, systematically seizing it and using it to serve its agenda and support its supporters.

The United Nations oversaw the largest international response to provide humanitarian aid to the Syrian people, amounting - according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies - to more than $ 40 billion, but the fate of this UN spending remained the subject of doubt and controversy with continuous accusations of the Syrian regime exploiting aid for its benefit. The earthquake of the sixth of February 2023 came to put the UN relief efforts in Syria in front of questions.

According to Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the Syrian regime is trying to use several methods to manipulate humanitarian aid.

Ahmed Benchemsi, Middle East communications director at Human Rights Watch, said the Syrian government has put in place a political and legal framework that allows it to use humanitarian aid to fund its atrocities, and has created significant obstacles to providing aid in some areas and using it to punish opponents and loyalists.

In his testimony as part of the investigation, a source from the UNHCR revealed that international organizations provide staff who adopt the official narrative and believe that the Syrian state is fighting terrorism, stressing that the report issued by the UN humanitarian documentation is issued only after submitting a draft to the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which defines the sentences contained in the report.

Ahmed Obeid, an investigative journalist, spoke about the Syrian regime's planting of informants within international organizations and imposing sums of money on these organizations.

Karam al-Shaar, director of the Syrian program at the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks, said that one of the ways the Syrian regime benefits from aid is to force UN institutions to hire people close to it, the most important example of which is that the wife of Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was appointed as a psychological adviser to the World Health Organization working in Damascus.

The role of the Asma al-Assad network and the Syrian Crescent

On the issue of manipulating humanitarian aid, the report focused on the role of the Syria Trust for Development network, which is linked to Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian president, and whose work was focused on educational, cultural and governance aspects, and never approached relief and humanitarian work, and the main change in its work occurred with the Syrian revolution.

As for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which is the largest relief organization operating in Syria, the network of entities and people associated with the Crescent shows a group of influential people close to the regime, led by its government-appointed director Khaled Haboubati and former Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem.

A former employee of the Syrian Red Crescent, who declined to disclose his identity and photograph, admitted in his testimony that the security intervention in the work of the Crescent was so strong and violent, that an ambulance is forced to request security approval in order to help the wounded in places where there are demonstrations, and the regime has increased its ferocity and interfered in the slightest details of the Red Crescent's work with the intensification of battles in the city of Aleppo and the occurrence of a geographical division.

Among the institutions controlling international aid in regime-controlled areas is the Al-Bustan Charitable Association, founded by Assad's cousin Rami Makhlouf.

In 2014, as areas outside the control of the regime expanded and UN missions were obstructed, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2265, which mandated the entry of aid across the border without passing through Damascus.

According to Mark Keats, the UN's Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria, there was a real consensus in the Security Council on the need to find ways to ensure that the needs of Syrian civilians who were not receiving humanitarian assistance were met.

It should be noted that the work of the United Nations in Syria was based on a United Nations General Assembly resolution stipulating that the provision of humanitarian assistance should be in accordance with the affected country in order to preserve the principle of the sovereignty of states, and that the affected country plays the primary role in humanitarian aid, but the situation in Syria was different under the responsibility of the authority for the disaster, as the UN efforts collided with the Syrian governmental and security measures.