This month, the UN finally reached Daraya with food baskets. Residents of the besieged city had not seen an aid delivery in over three years. However, due to indiscriminate regime airstrikes, people had to wait for days for the aid to be distributed. It was simply too dangerous for them to gather in one place.
As the local council of Daraya described it, ‘Pound-for-pound, the amount of explosives dropped on the city far exceeds that of humanitarian aid delivered.’
This is what one woman in Daraya had to say.
“On June 9, aid finally came into Daraya after four years of living under siege.
On June 10, regime barrel bombs were raining down on our heads.
Aid entered after four years of siege. My husband was one of the volunteers helping load the aid into the warehouses. The aid is not enough to meet the needs of civilians. It was only enough for 2,500 civilians. There are 8,000 of us.
Yesterday and today the warehouses storing the aid were targeted. And that’s in addition to the indiscriminate, incessant, regime shelling they’re carrying out deliberately to make it impossible to distribute the aid to civilians.
That the UN has been distributing that paper which is supposed to say what aid they’ve brought in. We still haven’t been able to do an inventory to check how much the regime took from it.
But because the aid isn’t enough for all civilians, we’ve decided to re-distribute the food baskets so that every family has something. We hope there’s enough so that each family gets half a food basket.
We’re calling for the siege to be lifted off Daraya and a ceasefire, an end to the barrel bombs and the surface-to-surface missiles.”
