ANKARA – Reuters – Oct 20, 2014 – The United Nations would offer humanitarian assistance for proposed “safe zones” inside Syria even if they were created without a Security Council resolution, the U.N. top humanitarian official Valerie Amos said on Monday.
An estimated 3 million people have fled Syria since 2011, when an uprising began against President Bashar al-Assad. About half of them are in neighboring Turkey, which wants the zones to be set up in Syria close to the its border where civilians could be protected from the civil war.
“If there happened to be areas of Syria that were established as protection or safe areas… we would get to those areas to give people help,” Valerie Amos, the Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator told Reuters in an interview.
Amos said any secure zone would require a force on the ground ensuring the protection of civilians, and ideally this should be done with the backing of a U.N. resolution. “The political differences we’ve seen on the Security Council make it less likely that this will be passed,” she said, while adding: “I hope that I’m wrong.”
“Of course some countries may decide this is important enough for them to go it alone. Whichever one of those things happens, the important thing is that if there is protection area or a safe zone, is that people are kept safe,” she said.
The U.N. already operates in parts of Syria where the government is not present, and also negotiates with rebel groups to reach some of the estimated 11 million people trapped inside the country and in need of help.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said last week he favored a U.N.-led effort to establish a no-fly zone over northern Syria, seen as a crucial first step towards establishing safe zones.