United Nations Aid to Syria: Lessons for UNRWA Overhaul

The bar is high in the competition for worst U.N. scandal. Sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers across Africa? Killing thousands with cholera by polluting the Haitian water supply? Disturbing to be sure, but the recent news about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) seemed to eclipse them all. Presented with evidence, the agency had to fire at least nine employees for taking part in Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and abduction of 240 more.

That is certainly the gravest crime ever committed by U.N. employees, yet the scandal with the greatest human cost was likely the U.N.’s delivery of massive subsidies to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime while it slaughtered its own people. From the earliest days of the war in Syria, which has killed upwards of half a million people, senior U.N. officials knew the regime was diverting or confiscating enormous amounts of humanitarian aid to finance its war effort. Nevertheless, they either resigned themselves to this arrangement or got in on the act, as did the World Health Organization chief in Damascus, who directed a multimillion-dollar contract to a personal associate while gifting cars and gold coins to regime officials. And the subsidies are still flowing into Syria today, even as donors suspend their funding of UNRWA in Gaza.

DA

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David Adesnik

David Adesnik is a senior fellow and the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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The bar is high in the competition for worst U.N. scandal. Sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers across Africa? Killing thousands with cholera by polluting the Haitian water supply? Disturbing to be sure, but the recent news about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) seemed to eclipse them all. Presented with evidence, the agency had to fire at least nine employees for taking part in Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and abduction of 240 more.

That is certainly the gravest crime ever committed by U.N. employees, yet the scandal with the greatest human cost was likely the U.N.’s delivery of massive subsidies to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime while it slaughtered its own people. From the earliest days of the war in Syria, which has killed upwards of half a million people, senior U.N. officials knew the regime was diverting or confiscating enormous amounts of humanitarian aid to finance its war effort. Nevertheless, they either resigned themselves to this arrangement or got in on the act, as did the World Health Organization chief in Damascus, who directed a multimillion-dollar contract to a personal associate while gifting cars and gold coins to regime officials. And the subsidies are still flowing into Syria today, even as donors suspend their funding of UNRWA in Gaza.