Aid group issues urgent appeal for quake-hit Syria

The group Doctors Without Borders called Sunday for the “urgent scaling up” of earthquake aid to northwest Syria as it delivered a convoy laden with emergency assistance.

Aid has been slow to reach Syria’s rebel-held areas since the February 6 quake killed a combined total of more than 43,000 people across Turkey and Syria.

“An urgent increase in the volume of supplies is needed to match the scale of the humanitarian crisis,” said the French aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF). It charged that supplies “currently fail to even match pre-earthquake volumes”. “Aid is trickling in in negligible amounts for the moment,” said Hakim Khaldi, MSF’s head of mission in Syria. “We emptied our emergency stocks in three days.”

“According to UN data, five days after the earthquake, only 10 trucks had entered” rebel-held areas of Syria through the Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey, MSF said.