Each year, the U.N. Security Council resumes negotiations to renew its resolution to allow cross-border assistance into Syria via Turkey and Iraq. U.N. agencies count on this mandate to work in Syria without being constrained by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which rarely allows aid to reach opposition areas. These negotiations have become a recurring flash point of the Syrian war drama: While the council’s members generally support the mandate, Russia has regularly used its veto power to decrease the number of border crossings U.N. agencies can use, to the point where only one, Bab al-Hawa, remains open today.
Although the Biden administration has signaled that Syria will no longer be a priority for Washington—for instance, it has not yet appointed a special envoy to the country, as the two previous administrations have done—it has spent significant time and political capital on this aspect of the conflict. Recently, in his June meetings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Joe Biden made sure to bring up the long-fraught issue of getting aid to the country, where the war is winding down after 10 years but humanitarian needs are on the rise.
