The United Nations Security Council is expected to decide this week on whether to renew its legal mandate for Syria’s cross-border humanitarian response. The Security Council vote has the potential to remake the life-saving humanitarian architecture that has been built around the country’s years-long civil war.
The Security Council’s decision may also—despite efforts by backers of renewal to cast it as a purely humanitarian measure—have real political significance. Since 2014, the Security Council has sanctioned cross-border aid without the consent of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, a powerful symbol of Syria’s disintegration and broken sovereignty. The re-centering of the international humanitarian response in Damascus would be another step towards restoring the Assad regime’s international legitimacy and effective political control.
If the Security Council ends this humanitarian framework, it will be another symbolic victory for the Assad regime. But it will also complicate and endanger the humanitarian aid that millions of Syrians rely on—and with which the regime is likely to interfere if it can reassert its hold on aid delivery. It was the regime’s intransigence and abuse that originally prompted the United Nations to suspend the normal rules of state sovereignty. Now, with no real improvement in its conduct, the regime is poised to claw back control over aid to populations it considers hostiles and enemies of the state.