Some 50 tons of EU-funded medical supplies that were flown to Turkey from Dubai are expected to enter Syria on December 31, a UN health official told Agence France-Presse on Friday.
The supplies, which were sent from a European Union stockpile in Dubai, landed in İstanbul early on Thursday and were to be driven to the border in the coming days.
“The supplies are still in Istanbul and going through customs,” Mrinalini Santhanam from the World Health Organization’s Gaziantep office in southern Turkey, told AFP, saying they would be driven south and likely cross the border into Syria on December 31.
The aim is to support Syria’s overstretched healthcare system, which has been battered by years of war under strongman Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted by rebels on December 8.
The shipment includes 8,000 emergency surgical kits, anaesthetic supplies, IV fluids, sterilization materials and medications to prevent disease outbreaks, with the EU saying it would be sent to support “healthcare systems in Idlib and northern Aleppo.”
“The supplies are mainly trauma and surgical kits that will enable doctors in Syria to deliver thousands of surgical operations and to care [for] injured patients,” WHO planning analyst Lorenzo Dal Monte told AFP when the shipment landed at İstanbul airport early Thursday.
The civil war, which broke out in 2011, had “devastated the country and the healthcare system. Almost half of the hospitals in Syria are not functional,” he said.
It was the first part of an EU humanitarian bridge announced by Brussels on December 13, with a second 46-ton delivery to follow from Denmark.