Red Cross 'can't cope’ with worsening Syria aid crisis

GENEVA: The humanitarian situation in Syria is now so bad that the Red Cross is struggling to cope, the new head of the international aid agency said Thursday.
“The humanitarian situation is getting worse despite the scope of the operation increasing,” Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told reporters in Geneva.
“We can’t cope with the worsening of the situation.”
The ICRC, which works in collaboration with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to deliver aid in the conflict-wracked country, nonetheless has “a lot of blank spots” with regard to the needs of the people on the ground, he said.
“There is an unknown number of people in Syria who do not get the aid they need,” Maurer said, adding that the Red Cross had no strategy in the country beyond taking action when and where it could.
“There is no point in planning. You try every day to fill the crack that is opening. We have to see when we have an opportunity to so something, the fighting is (always) moving, you have considerations that escape any modelling.”
The new Red Cross chief, who conducted talks with the Syrian regime in September, described the agency’s recent delivery of aid to Homs as “an utterly important achievement.”
“But that was only one city,” Maurer said, adding that the agency had not gained access to Aleppo “in a while” and could get into other cities such as Idlib “but not far beyond.”
The agency had “no overall figures, only estimates, suspicions” on the level of need, Maurer said.
The conflict has claimed some 37,000 lives since it erupted in March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, while the United Nations has estimated the number of people in need at around 1.2 million.
While refugee numbers fleeing Syria gave an indication of the situation, within Syria “we know little about internally displaced person numbers and where people are in their ability to cope with an increasingly difficult situation,” Maurer said.