Julian Borger
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| US air force drones have previously been used to drop aid in Iraq. Photograph: Cory Payne/USA/Rex/Shutterstock |
Talks have been held on how to get food and medicine to besieged people including use of parachute drops and edible drones
The US and UK have been holding talks to explore ways to airdrop food and medical supplies to eastern Aleppo and other besieged populations in Syria.
The talks have been going on for months in Washington and have considered a broad range of possibilities, from parachute drops to creating an air bridge with drone flights, and even flying in edible drones that can be taken apart and eaten.
However, the discussions have been mired in disagreements between government agencies, the reluctance of the military to get involved and concern among officials that flying in aid without permission from the Damascus regime and its allies could hamper conventional humanitarian deliveries.
However, as the talks have stalled, the plight of the people of eastern Aleppo has steadily become more desperate. No road convoy has got through to the enclave for five months, hospitals have all been destroyed and rebel-held areas are under constant bombardment.
A meeting in the UK embassy last week was intended to inject some momentum to the discussions and get some decisions made. It was introduced by the ambassador, Kim Darroch, and brought US and British officials together, in addition to humanitarian drone specialists from the private sector.
But by the time the meeting took place almost half of eastern Aleppo had been overrun, and there were fears that by the time any drone-borne aid finally took to the air, there would be no one there left to save.
“There was talk in private that all this was too late,” said one of the participants.
Syrian government forces have taken control of more than half of Aleppo’s rebel districts after fierce bombardments and ground advances forced tens of thousands to flee last week.
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| A still image taken from a drone flying over Aleppo in September. Photograph: Reuters Tv/Reuters |
However, there are other trapped and starving populations all around Syria. The UN estimates 1 million Syrians are living under siege, more than half of them children.
As the world has watched the people of Aleppo die in their thousands, with no sign of UN humanitarian convoys reaching those in need even during brief “humanitarian pauses” in the onslaught, various ideas have been put forward in western capitals on whether it was possible to shame Damascus and Moscow into letting aid convoys through.
One suggestion was to man the convoys with diplomats from western and Arab countries in the 25-nation International Syria Support Group (ISSG).
However, there is little optimism such a gesture would protect a relief convoy. “There are discussions about a convoy ‘adopted’ by ISSG members. But it would need GoS [Government of Syria] and Russian approval to pass all checkpoints and thus have the same fate as the UN convoys unless GoS and Russia was part of the effort,” Jan Egeland, humanitarian adviser to the UN special envoy on Syria, said in an email.
Meanwhile, traditional airdrops from military transport planes would have to be carried out at such high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft missiles that they would be worse than useless.
“Unfortunately airdrops cannot be done on a heavily populated urban area. We could hurt as many as we helped,” Egeland said.
“The contents of the drops would liquify on the way down, and they would most likely miss their target, destroy buildings or kill the people they are supposed to save,” said an official involved in the Washington talks.
The US and UK military have pointed out that any relief flights made without Syrian government or Russian permission risk causing an international incident that could spiral out of control.
“We have been asked for our opinion on it and we have provided our views,” Gen Joseph Votel, the head of US central command, told the Guardian. “It would be extraordinarily difficult and it’s not the ideal way to move the kind of quantities you need.”
In the UK, more than 200 MPs supported a call for British airdrops, but the government warned it would be hugely complicated and could put UK forces in harm’s way.
Two engineering graduates from Aleppo University, Abdulrahman and Amr Shayah, have called for the use of guided parachute drops which have cameras and navigation equipment on the aid pallets, allowing an aircraft to fly at 35,000ft (10,670 metres) and drop its payload up to 100km (62 miles) from the intended target.
“There has been a shameful indifference towards imposing a no-fly zone that could still save thousands of lives. Let’s not make safe airdrops of aid another missed opportunity,” they said in a public appeal on Friday.
Advocates of humanitarian drones argue that even small payloads of medical supplies can have a dramatic impact in helping besieged civilians survive a siege, and that significant quantities of food can be flown in by drones in an air bridge, with a hundred or more flights operating day and night.
The commercially made drones discussed at the UK embassy meeting could carry payloads of 2kg to 50kg. For use in a conflict zone like Syria they could be programmed to randomise their flight path, altering altitude and direction in unpredictable ways so they would be harder to shoot down. The guidance circuitry could also self-destruct in the event of a crash, so it could not be used as a weapon if it fell into the wrong hands.
The use of unmanned aircraft for delivering humanitarian aid is still in its infancy, however. A year ago, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Ghanaian health service conducted a pilot initiative, using drones to deliver contraceptives to women in remote rural areas. Earlier this year, a California-based drone company called Zipline began delivering blood supplies to remote transfusion clinics in Rwanda.
A British inventor, Nick Gifford, said he was called to meet the international development secretary, Priti Patel, on Thursday to discuss his design for an edible drone that could be packed with food, spars that could be made of solid foodstuffs and a light airframe that could be used as a shelter.
“She gave her full support to our solution and is keen to help but we still have to go through the various government machinations to see which organisation will look at official government involvement,” said Gifford, who was part of a small UK drone company, Ascenta, bought by Facebook in 2014 for nearly $20m.
The UK’s Department for International Development did not respond to a request for comment. An official involved in the Washington talks, however, said edible drones was one of the options discussed.
This is not the first attempt to organise unmanned aid drops into Syria. In 2014, a US-led team of volunteers attempted to build a fleet of low-budget drones that could be locally assembled and used to get aid to besieged communities in Syria. The initiative, the Syria Airlift Project, folded in December 2015, after technical problems and a lack of funding.
Now there is strong interest from some parts of the US and UK governments in a large-scale drone airlift, but there are still significant obstacles. Most of the drone flights would have to take off from Turkey and would need Ankara’s permission. The technology is also only just being field tested, and it is unclear whether flying in aid against the will of the Syrian government and Russia would lead them to block conventional land deliveries that might otherwise have got through.
“It’s an open question how this would affect access for traditional delivery methods. It could go one way or another. These are such complex situations,” said one of the participants in Wednesday’s embassy meeting. “But non-action is no longer an option.”
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