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Russian planes deliver about 40 tonnes of aid to besieged Syrian city

Wednesday, 18 May 2016 1:32 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 18 May 2016 1:32 PM ]

People unload boxes from a lorry after an aid convoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered the town of Rastan, Homs Province, Syria, April 25, 2016. ©AFP

Russian aircraft have delivered almost 40 tonnes of humanitarian aid supplies to Syria’s eastern city of Dayr al-Zawr, which is under the siege of the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.

“Two Russian planes airdropped 38,500 tonnes of humanitarian aid, mostly food packages and cereals, on parachutes in” Dayr al-Zawr, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a daily bulletin posted on its website late on Tuesday.

Daesh controls over half of Dayr al-Zawr, the capital of a province with the same name, trapping about 200,000 civilians in the city. The region links the Daesh stronghold in the city of Raqqah with territory controlled by the militant group in neighboring Iraq.

The fresh airdrop of food and emergency supplies came hours after participants at the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) meeting agreed that from June, the UN would begin airdrops of aid for all areas in need if ground access to besieged areas continued to be denied.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L), US Secretary of State John Kerry (C) and United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura (R) attend the ministerial meeting on Syria in Vienna, Austria, May 17, 2016. ©Reuters

Over the past few days, Dayr al-Zawr has witnessed clashes between the extremists and the Syrian government troops.

On Monday, the Syrian forces wrested control of the national hospital of Day al-Zawr after several hours of fierce fighting with the Daesh extremists.

A cessation of hostilities, brokered by Moscow and Washington, was introduced in Syria in February in a bid to facilitate dialogue between rival parties in the Arab country.

However, renewed violence in some parts of Syria, especially the northwestern city of Aleppo, has left the ceasefire in tatters in recent weeks and torpedoed the peace talks.

Recently, local regimes of silence have been enforced in several areas of the war-torn Middle Eastern country.

United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict that has gripped Syria since March 2011.

Some 1.1 million people live under siege in violence-wracked Syria, according to the Siege Watch monitoring organization.

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