Author Archives: News Sources

Was Col. Strelkov’s dispatch about a downed ‘Ukrainian plane’ authentic?

The Interpreter reports: When regular watchers of the news from the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” saw the latest dispatch on 17 July from Col. Igor Strelkov, the self-appointed “Defense Minister” of the DPR, they realized that the pro-Russian separatists didn’t know yet what had happened.


Here is a translation by The Interpreter of the dispatch as it originally appeared at Svodki Strelkova Igora Ivanovicha, or “Igor Ivanovich Strelkov’s Dispatches”, a community at the popular Russian social networking site VKontakte:

“In the area of Torez, we have just shot down an AN-26 airplane, it is scattered about somewhere by the Progress coal mine.

We warned them – don’t fly ‘in our sky.’

Here is a video confirmation of the latest ‘bird drop.’

The bird fell beyond the slag heap, it did not damage the residential sector.

Civilians were not hurt.

There is also information about a second downed airplane, apparently an SU.”

As we reported 17 July, this post that originally appeared on the “Strelkov’s Dispatches” VKontakte group showed that the pro-Russian separatists were boasting about having downed yet another Ukrainian airplane — or maybe even two — just as they had done on 14 July with a powerful anti-aircraft system in Krasnodon.

As this apparent admission of the downing of the plane seemed to be a smoking gun in the tragedy of the Malaysian airline, it has come under much scrutiny as possibly a “fake” or just a blog post of an unofficial Strelkov fan group that might be prone to erroneous postings.

From our long observation of this Vkontakte group and other Strelkov-related pages, we would have to say this is not the case – this group’s publications have long been cited by regional media and the same talking points as the dispatch were also used by Russian state media and Ukrainian media from other separatist sources. [Continue reading…]

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RT ‘covers’ the shooting down of MH17

Adam Holland writes: Operating a fake news channel to promote state propaganda comes with considerable intrinsic problems and contradictions. Propaganda and news reporting have contrary purposes that propagandists carefully work to obscure by various means. That’s the art of propaganda: blurring the line between reality and BS, creating false equivalencies between the two, and implicitly arguing that the BS is superior. That’s easy for the propagandist when he can cherry-pick what he covers and restrict the information that enters into the conversation. But occasionally events overtake the propagandist’s ability to control the message. The mask slips, and he is revealed as being what he was all along: a craftsman of untruths.

That’s exactly what’s happened very suddenly and clearly yesterday at Russia’s RT news agency. As the wreckage of MH17 burned in the streets and yards of a small town in Donetsk Region in Ukraine, and as the bodies of its 298 passengers and crew lay where they were strewn, unburied and still warm, the people at RT and other Russian propaganda outlets rushed to fill the void between rapidly unfolding reality and the needs of those in power in Russia. How could they both present the appearance of reporting while maintaining Putin’s brand?

Under ordinary circumstances, RT can carefully craft their reporting to fit their underlying message, but when a surface-to-air missile downed that plane, this process was exposed and thrown out of control.

In the morning, as their video showed the smoking wreckage of MH17, RT repeatedly aired two sound clips from two interviews: one with an anonymous witness who off-handedly claimed that he saw the SAM launched from a Ukrainian army position, and another with an anonymous Russian military expert who asserted that the Ukrainian military must have downed the plane. The expert based this conclusion not on any particular knowledge of the facts concerning the shoot-down, but on his assessment of the Ukrainian military as being “inept”. These two clips were repeatedly played on Thursday morning, at least once every 15 minutes. [Continue reading…]

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RT correspondent: ‘Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.’

BuzzFeed: Sara Firth, a longstanding London-based correspondent for Russia Today, resigned on Friday in protest at the channel’s coverage of the Malaysia Airlines crash.

Firth, who joined the channel in 2009, told BuzzFeed that she decided to resign from the Kremlin-funded news channel because she felt it was “disrespectfully” attempting to pin the blame for Thursday’s Malaysia Airlines disaster on the Ukrainian government.

“When this story broke I ran back into the newsroom and saw how we were covering it already and I just knew I had to go,” she said.

“It was the total disregard to the facts. We threw up eyewitness accounts from someone on the ground openly accusing the Ukrainian government [of involvement in the disaster], and a correspondent in the studio pulled up a plane crash before that the Ukrainian government had been involved in and said it was ‘worth mentioning’.

“It’s not worth mentioning. It’s Russia Today all over, it’s flirting with that border of overtly lying. You’re not telling a lie, you’re just bringing something up. I didn’t want to watch a story like that, where people have lost loved ones and we’re handling it like that.

“I couldn’t do it any more. Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.”

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Some of Israel’s top supporters say it’s time to end U.S. military aid

Eli Lake reports: Elliott Abrams — a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and a leading pro-Israel writer and policy analyst — told The Daily Beast, “My view is over time it would be healthy for the relationship if the aid diminished. Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance and should become the kind of ally that we have in Australia, Canada, or the United Kingdom: an intimate military relationship and alliance, but no military aid.”

That is also the view expressed by leading Israeli politicians. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of economics and the leader of the right-wing Israel Home party, said in 2013, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly 1 percent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it. We have to do it responsibly, since I’m not aware of all the aspects of the budget. I don’t want to say, ‘Let’s just give it up,’ but our situation today is very different from what it was 20 and 30 years ago.”

Today Israel is prosperous. In 2000, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $124.9 billion. In 2013, the Israeli GDP was $291.3 billion. And that is before Israel has seen any real revenue from the fields of natural gas it recently discovered. The country has become so prosperous that legislation is now before the country’s Knesset to create a sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned investment vehicle designed to invest the surplus revenue Israel collects from selling its natural gas.

“I have heard discussions of a sovereign wealth fund, by which the Israelis mean they want to handle the revenues carefully the way Norway does and not waste them,” Abrams said. “But I do not believe a country that has a sovereign wealth fund can be an aid recipient.”

Abrams was careful to say he did not favor cutting the military aid while Obama was still president. “Were there a reduction now, it would be attributed to administration hostility to Israel and be seen as a weakening of U.S. support,” he said. “It should be done only in a context of robust American political support and close relations between American and Israeli leaders.” [Continue reading…]

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While Iraq burns, ISIS takes advantage in Syria

Michael Stephens and Sofia Barbarani write: The Islamic State (Isis) may be many things, but foolish is not one of them.

While international attention has been fixated on the disintegration of Iraq and the expansion of the so-called caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Sunni insurgents have moved their offensive back into Syria with a newly acquired haul of US-made weapons and cash.

Cushioned by the impunity offered them by a largely unresponsive international community, and the inability of the Syrian and Iraqi armies to defeat them in battle, Isis’ latest advances in Syria have further destabilised the already frail dynamics in the region.

As Bashar al-Assad attended his de-facto self-coronation affording him another seven years in power, Isis was making a mockery of the president’s pledge to “not stop fighting terrorism and striking it wherever it is until we restore security to every spot of Syria”.

In addition to Isis, Syria’s Kurds have also been busy establishing their own cantons of self-governance, backed by their militia force, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). But as their control over Kurdish areas of Syria has strengthened, it has brought them into fierce conflict with Isis.

While in neighbouring Iraq the Kurdistan Region remains largely insulated from Isis’ violent land-grabbing operations, Syria’s approximately two million Kurds have borne the brunt of the expanding “caliphate” declared at the end of June. [Continue reading…]

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Why Putin let MH17 get shot down

James Miller writes: President Putin has been recklessly escalating the crisis in eastern Ukraine since he was embarrassed and outmaneuvered by the Ukrainian president three weeks ago. Allowing a passenger jet to be shot down is the act of an increasingly desperate man.

The Kremlin ordered tanks, heavy weapons and Russian fighters to pour over the border stoking up the crisis until tragedy struck. We should have seen it coming; on Wednesday morning the front page of Foreign Policy magazine had a headline that should have sent shockwaves through the geopolitical landscape: Russia Is Firing Missiles At Ukraine.

The story followed several Russian citizens posting videos to social media which they said show GRAD rockets being fired from Russian territory toward Ukraine. By triangulating the different camera angles, my team at The Interpreter proved that the unguided rockets were indeed being fired into Ukraine from Russia. Thursday morning, there were reports that a group of Ukrainian soldiers had been hit by the rocket fire and were actually receiving medical treatment on the other side of the border, ironically enough in the same town from which the rockets had been launched in the first place.

This should have been huge news. How could things in Ukraine have deteriorated to the point where Putin was now engaged in such a reckless act of aggression? Of course, it was huge news… but for only a few hours. Quickly this headline was buried under the news that another Malaysian airlines flight was missing, and evidence is steadily growing that either Russian-backed separatists or Russia itself may have fired the missile that brought it down.

While much of the media is trying to figure out who shot this aircraft down, with what weapon and where it was obtained, it might be more instructive to focus instead on the ‘whys’ of this incident.

Why would Putin want to shoot down a commercial airliner? And if it was an accident, why would Putin allow the separatists to have a weapon this powerful without having full control over how it was used? [Continue reading…]

Quartz reports: US and Ukrainian officials believe a “Buk” surface-to-air missile shot Malaysia Airlines flight 17 out of the sky in eastern Ukraine yesterday, killing all 298 people on board.

Truck-mounted Buk missile systems were originally designed in Russia in the 1970s. They are now made by Almaz-Antey, a Russian state company formed in 2002 (link in Russian) by a presidential decree that joined together 46 different research and production firms. The company’s slogan is “High technologies safeguarding peaceful skies.”

The Buk missiles — the name means “beech,” as in the tree — are one of Almaz-Antey’s “land-based defense products.” [Continue reading…]

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Document shows it was the FBI, not the NSA, that monitored 5 Americans

electrospaces.net: [O]n July 9, 2014, Glenn Greenwald published an article which he earlier announced as being the grand finale of the Snowden-revelations. It would demonstrate that NSA is also spying on ordinary American citizens, something that would clearly be illegal.

The report is titled “Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On” and it tells the story of Faisal Gill, Asim Ghafoor, Hooshang Amirahmadi, Agha Saeed and Nihad Awad whose e-mail addresses were found in an NSA file from the Snowden-trove. Although the article confusingly mentions both FBI and NSA, many people and media got the impression that this was the long-awaited major NSA abuse scandal.

But as we will show here, the document that was published contains no evidence of any involvement of the NSA in this particular case. Everything indicates that it was actually an FBI operation, so it seems not justified to have NSA mentioned in the article. [Continue reading…]

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The architects of the latest war on Gaza

Nathan Thrall explains why Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian “national consensus” government in which Hamas does not have a single member — and the Obama administration’s acquiescence to that position — paved the way to the current war on Gaza.

Israel strongly opposed American recognition of the new government… and sought to isolate it internationally, seeing any small step toward Palestinian unity as a threat. Israel’s security establishment objects to the strengthening of West Bank-Gaza ties, lest Hamas raise its head in the West Bank. And Israelis who oppose a two-state solution understand that a unified Palestinian leadership is a prerequisite for any lasting peace.

Still, despite its opposition to the reconciliation agreement, Israel continued to transfer the tax revenues it collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf, and to work closely with the new government, especially on security cooperation.

But the key issues of paying Gaza’s civil servants and opening the border with Egypt were left to fester. The new government’s ostensible supporters, especially the United States and Europe, could have pushed Egypt to ease border restrictions, thereby demonstrating to Gazans that Hamas rule had been the cause of their isolation and impoverishment. But they did not.

Instead, after Hamas transferred authority to a government of pro-Western technocrats, life in Gaza became worse.

Qatar had offered to pay Gaza’s 43,000 civil servants, and America and Europe could have helped facilitate that. But Washington warned that American law prohibited any entity delivering payment to even one of those employees — many thousands of whom are not members of Hamas but all of whom are considered by American law to have received material support from a terrorist organization.

When a United Nations envoy offered to resolve this crisis by delivering the salaries through the United Nations, so as to exclude all parties from legal liability, the Obama administration did not assist. Instead, it stood by as Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called for the envoy’s expulsion on the grounds that he was “trying to funnel money” to Hamas.

Hamas is now seeking through violence what it couldn’t obtain through a peaceful handover of responsibilities. Israel is pursuing a return to the status quo ante, when Gaza had electricity for barely eight hours a day, water was undrinkable, sewage was dumped in the sea, fuel shortages caused sanitation plants to shut down and waste sometimes floated in the streets. Patients needing medical care couldn’t reach Egyptian hospitals, and Gazans paid $3,000 bribes for a chance to exit when Egypt chose to open the border crossing.

For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. [Continue reading…]

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Israelis cheer as rockets rain down on Gaza

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that there are an estimated 57,900 children in Gaza who have experienced death, injury or loss of home over the past ten days and require direct and specialized psychosocial support.

The Palestinian fatality toll since the start of the latest Israeli assault is now 230. According to preliminary information, at least 74 percent (171 people) are civilians, 48 of whom are children and 31 women.

1,764 Palestinians have been injured, of whom 521 are children and 372 women.

22,900 displaced people hosted at UNRWA shelters are in need of emergency food assistance.

This evening, the Gaza health ministry has updated the death toll to 247, with 1910 people injured.

And meanwhile Israelis in Sderot are cheering.

Mondoweiss reports: The Israeli military has destroyed el-Wafa rehabilitation hospital in the Gaza Strip, after first targeting the facility with five missiles on July 11, 2014. The Israeli military began striking the building around 8:oo pm this evening and within two hours all hospital staff and patients had evacuated the only rehabilitation center in the Gaza Strip. As they departed what remained intact from the medical center burned to the ground.

“It’s already destroyed,” said Basman Alashi, director of el-Wafa, continuing, “I don’t know how much is left of it, but we have evacuated all of our patients. We lost power, there was a fire in the building.”

Alashi spoke to me via telephone from his house in Gaza, unable to cross the Israeli shelling to reach the hospital. “I left the hospital at seven and within two hours they had bombed the hospital.” Shells hit every floor of the building, and a fire spread throughout.

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Hamas leader says Israel must ‘lift siege’ of Gaza before any ceasefire

The Telegraph reports: Hamas has ruled out a ceasefire deal unless Israel “lifts the siege” on Gaza, the organisation’s political chief has told The Telegraph.

In his first interview since the recent conflict in Gaza, Khaled Meshaal has said his organisation will not accept a simple cessation of fire by both sides, and that the deal must include long term commitments to improve the “rights of the Palestinian people”.

With mediators gathered in Cairo in an effort find a solution to a conflict that has already seen more than two hundred Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes, Mr Meshaal, for the first time, laid out the demands of his organisation.

He said that Israel must “stop the aggression” of air strikes against targets in Gaza, release the dozens of Palestinians detained in response to last month’s kidnapping of three Israeli students in the West Bank, and “end the siege on Gaza permanently”.

“These are our clear demands,” said Mr Meshaal. “We won’t accept an agreement that prolongs the suffering of our people anymore. In Gaza, for the past seven years of siege, its 1.8 million people have been living in a prison.”

The demands go much further than a return to the truce brokered in Cairo in 2012, to put an end to eight days of fighting in the Gaza strip.

That truce included a pledge to open a border crossing, intending to ease the blockade of the coastal enclave.

On Thursday, Mr Meshaal said that an easing of the restrictions was no longer acceptable and that Hamas would stop at nothing short of a “full and permanent” lifting of the blockade that, as well as regulating the traffic of people and goods at the border crossing, forbids trade from Gaza’s port.

Since General Abdul Fatah Sisi, who considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, became president of Egypt earlier this year, Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt has also remained mostly closed. [Continue reading…]

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Israel launches Gaza ground invasion

Al Jazeera reports: Israeli tanks entered Gaza on Thursday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a ground invasion, a major escalation in a ten-day offensive that has already killed more than 230 Palestinians.

Witnesses in Gaza reported heavy bombing from jets, warships and artillery stationed along the border, with much of the firing was directed at northern Gaza. The electricity was cut off across a large swathe of the strip, though it was unclear why.

A statement from Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon described the invasion as focused on destroying tunnels connecting Gaza to Israel.

A group of gunmen tried to enter southern Israel through a tunnel from Gaza on Thursday morning; the army said eight of the 13 attackers were killed, and Hamas claimed responsibility for the operation. It was the second such incident in the past ten days. [Continue reading…]

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NBC News pulls Mohyeldin from Gaza after witnessing Israelis kill four children

Glenn Greenwald writes: Despite this powerful first-hand reporting [on Israeli attacks which killed four boys on a Gaza beach yesterday] – or perhaps because of it – [NBC News correspondent Ayman] Mohyeldin was nowhere to be seen on last night’s NBC Nightly News broadcast with Brian Williams. Instead, as Media Bistro’s Jordan Charlton noted, NBC curiously had Richard Engel – who was in Tel Aviv, and had just arrived there an hour or so earlier – “report” on the attack. Charlton wrote that “the decision to have Engel report the story for ‘Nightly’ instead of Mohyeldin angered some NBC News staffers.”

Indeed, numerous NBC employees, including some of the network’s highest-profile stars, were at first confused and then indignant over the use of Engel rather than Mohyeldin to report the story. But what they did not know, and what has not been reported until now, is that Mohyeldin was removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, David Verdi, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.

Over the last two weeks, Mohyeldin’s reporting has been far more balanced and even-handed than the standard pro-Israel coverage that dominates establishment American press coverage; his reports have provided context to the conflict that is missing from most American reports and he avoids adopting Israeli government talking points as truth. As a result, neocon and “pro-Israel” websites have repeatedly attacked him as a “Hamas spokesman” and spouting “pro-Hamas rants.” [Continue reading…]

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Malaysia Airlines plane disappears over Ukraine, feared shot down by missile

The Washington Post reports: Malaysia Airlines said Thursday that it lost contact with an airliner that was flying in Ukrainian airspace, raising fears that the plane may have been shot down over eastern Ukraine.

“We lost contact with Flight MH17 in Ukraine,” said Najmuddin Abdullah, who works in Malaysia Airlines’ press office.

An adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister wrote on Facebook that a Buk antiaircraft missile system shot down the plane over the village of Torez, about 25 miles east of the city of Donetsk and within territory held by pro-Russian separatist rebels.

The plane was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members, Anton Herashchenko, the Interior Ministry adviser, wrote on his Facebook page, without revealing how he knew the information. He blamed the rebels for the attack.

Julia Ioffe writes: Russian state media reported in late June indicate the rebels got a hold of a Buk missile system, a Russian/Soviet surface to air system. Rebels are now denying that they shot down the plane, but there are now screenshots floating around the Russian-language internet from what seems to be the Facebook page of Igor Strelkov, a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine, showing plumes of smoke and bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian military Antonov plane shortly before MaH 17 fell. “Don’t fly in our skies,” he reportedly wrote. If that’s true, it would seem rebels downed the jetliner, having mistaken it for a Ukrainian military jet.

This all has to be confirmed, though the separatists did issue statements saying they downed an Antonov this morning and took five of its crew members hostage. There is also an off-chance that the Ukrainian miliatry did it, having also declared a no-fly zone in the area recently. The rebels are, of course, busily blaming the Ukrainian military.

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UNRWA strongly condemns placement of rockets in school

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East: Yesterday, in the course of the regular inspection of its premises, UNRWA discovered approximately 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA strongly condemns the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations. This is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law. This incident, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk UNRWA’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestine refugees in Gaza.

Immediately after discovery, the Agency informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects in order to preserve the safety and security of the school. UNRWA has launched a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident.

UNRWA has strong, established procedures to maintain the neutrality of all its premises, including a strict no-weapons policy and routine inspections of its installations, to ensure they are only used for humanitarian purposes. UNRWA will uphold and further reinforce its procedures.

Palestinian civilians in Gaza rely on UNRWA to provide humanitarian assistance and shelter. At all times, and especially during escalations of violence, the sanctity and integrity of UN installations must be respected.

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Life and death in Aleppo: ‘You don’t get used to fear’

As Israel has once again been brutally collectively punishing the population of Gaza, the misery not far away in Syria has continued while attracting a small fraction of the world’s attention. This year, in Aleppo alone, 2,000 people have been killed with 560 of them children. The principle instrument of death has been barrel bombs dropped by the Assad air force.

A Syrian correspondent for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting writes: “Three barrel bombs, two missiles, five mortars… No, no the last explosion is caused by a barrel not a mortar.” This is the first discussion I have with my half-asleep self while turning off my morning alarm. I still use an alarm even though one is provided by the noise of missiles landing nearby.

It takes a couple of minutes to recognise where I am. Had I been told three years ago that I would be living in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, in the middle of war, an expert in distinguishing explosives by their noise, I would have laughed. Before the war, I was living in Damascus. Before the war, the regime had for many years been quietly imprisoning those who opposed it, but I didn’t know about the political prisoners until I went to university. Then I discovered that many of my relatives were killed in the 1980s when, in response to an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood, the regime massacred thousands, including civilians, in the city of Hama.

Bringing myself back to today, I make my coffee while reading Facebook to see what damage last night’s bombings caused. I am lucky to have the money to pay for a satellite internet connection. This is the only way to get online here in the rebel-held areas of Syria because for almost two years all means of communication have been cut — landlines, the mobile network and the internet — as collective punishment for areas that rebelled against the regime. Fighters and activists use walkie-talkies but as a woman I am not allowed to use one. This area of the city has long been very conservative and women don’t participate in public life; now it is also a frontline in a warzone, even more of a male-only domain. [Continue reading…]

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Weeks of combat in Iraq show Shiite militias have few offensive capabilities

McClatchy reports: The sectarian Shiite militias that the government in Baghdad has dispatched to fill the void created by the collapse of the Iraqi army are proving ill-equipped for offensive operations intended to reverse gains by the radical Islamic State, Iraqi soldiers and military experts studying the current military situation have concluded.

The inadequacy of the militias to turn the tide was demonstrated again on Wednesday six miles south of Tikrit, the central Iraqi city that Islamic State fighters seized June 11 and that Iraqi forces and Shiite fighters have been trying to reclaim for more than two weeks.

Local residents and Iraqi media reported that the Iraqi military backed by militias attempted to push through the town of Awja toward Tikrit but were beaten back by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from Islamic State positions.

“It was a big battle and the Iraqi army and the Iranian militias have gone,” said one local resident, whose reference to the Shiite militias as Iranians is common, if inaccurate, in heavily Sunni regions of Iraq. “They withdrew to a base south of Awja.” The resident declined to be identified for security reasons.

A Twitter account associated with the Islamic State posted photographs of what it said was the aftermath of the fighting, including images of burning armored vehicles and at least one destroyed pickup truck emblazoned with the logo of SWAT, a highly trained Iraqi army special forces unit. The photographs were consistent with descriptions of the fighting, the units present and the location of the battle, though their authenticity could not be confirmed.

The apparent defeat underscored a growing sense that the Iraqi security forces have misplaced their hopes that the Shiite militias would prove decisive in the fight against the Islamic State. While the militias are given credit for stopping the Islamic State’s advance on cities such as Samarra, home of a major Shiite religious shrine, and Baghdad, they’ve proved ineffective in retaking ground. Their casualties apparently have been high. [Continue reading…]

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UN ends border ban to bring food to millions of desperate Syrians

AFP reports: Aid agencies said Tuesday they were ready to truck desperately-needed supplies to 2.9 million more Syrians after the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution backing cross-border convoys.

“UN agencies have supplies ready to go to all of those hard to reach areas. They had those in place for some time,” Amanda Pitt, spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian aid coordination arm, told reporters.

The United Nations estimates that 10.8 million people — or half the pre-war population — need aid in Syria, many in areas cut off by fighting.

Reuters adds: The U.N. World Food Programme rushed on Wednesday to put monitors at Syrian border posts, and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF had aid ready for the first convoys to cross into rebel-held areas under the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.

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