Far from their offices in Washington DC, three members of the US House of Representatives traveled this Sunday to a rebel area in northern Syria, controlled by pro-Turkish factions, AFP journalists noted on the spot. .
Thus, parliamentarians Joe Wilson, Victoria Spartz and Dean Phillips visited a hospital in the city of Azaz, north of Aleppo, passing through Turkey, via the Bab al-Salama border post, where they were welcomed with a banner bearing the message “Welcome to free Syria”, surrounded by flags of the Syrian revolution. “The purpose of the visit was to observe the situation in the liberated areas,” public relations officer in the Turkish-backed interim government, Yasser el-Hajji, told AFP.
Meet orphans
“Those who seek to normalize and make deals with (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad are dealing with death itself,” MP Joe Wilson blasted Friday on X (formerly Twitter).
The elected officials met with orphans from the civil war who have killed more than 500,000 people since 2011, before shortening their visit for security reasons, a member of their escort told AFP.
The jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), dominated by the former Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, is the main group active in the last pocket of armed opposition comprising a large part of the province of Idleb and territories bordering the provinces of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia. Other less influential rebel factions, backed to varying degrees by Turkey, are also present.
Where to send humanitarian aid
“In order to avoid any controversy in the United States, they chose not to continue towards Jindayris, in the territories controlled by HTS”, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
According to Rami Abdel Rahmane, the parliamentarians “wanted to evaluate the work of the interim government in order to study the possibility of sending humanitarian aid via Bab el-Salama instead of Bab el-Hawa”, controlled by HTS.
Under a UN mechanism deployed in 2014, Bab al-Hawa was the last border crossing with Turkey through which UN humanitarian agencies could channel humanitarian aid without prior authorization from the Syrian government.
On July 11, this mechanism denounced by Damascus as a violation of its sovereignty was not renewed, before the UN announced in early August an agreement with the regime to maintain it for six months via Bab al-Hawa.