U.N. Says Damascus Blocking Aid Efforts

The Damascus regime is guilty of "tremendous political obstruction" that is preventing aid reaching an estimated 850,000 people in need in Syria, a top U.N. relief official said on Monday.

Launching an appeal to help Syrians both at home and abroad, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) director of operations John Ging accused the regime of blocking visas for some aid workers.

"There is an unwillingness on the part of the Syrian authorities to deliver visas to certain nationalities and that to us is unacceptable," Ging said.

"And it is something we are taking up on a daily basis with the Syrian authorities because it is obstructing our capacity on the ground," he said, without specifying which nationalities were affected.

About $193 million (158 million euros) is needed for the internal Syrian aid effort and $189 million to help refugees in neighboring countries, but there is an almost 80 percent funding shortfall, OCHA said.

"The message to the donors from the humanitarian agencies is: we need more money. If we don't get more money people will die and there will be more humanitarian suffering," Ging said in Geneva.

He said his organization faced "a lot of obstacles" in its efforts to help the vast numbers of Syrians in need after 16 months of conflict that has left more than 17,000 people dead according to activists.

"We face tremendous political obstruction from the government of Syria, we face an incredibly dangerous operational environment because of the conflict itself," Ging said.

"And we face capacity issues among the agencies trying to scale up physically from little or no humanitarian operations to a massive humanitarian operation."

Speaking at the fourth Humanitarian Forum on Syria, Ging said there had been a "significant scale-up" in the humanitarian response since the last forum in June when Damascus agreed to a $180-million (145-million-euro) draft plan for delivering aid.

Initial estimates of 500,000 people in need of food aid inside Syria have had to be scaled up to 850,000 people, Ging said.

In addition to those in need in Syria, some 112,000 refugees have already been registered Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, with some 700 Syrians crossing the border every day last month, Ging said.