"Billions of donor dollars from the U.S. and other countries that pass through the United Nations too often end up with dictators and governments responsible for the crises that prompt the international aid effort in the first place, according to a wide range of critics and agencies involved in those efforts.
The issue of corrupt governments skimming off or seizing international aid and supplies isn't a new one, observers agree. But the scale of crises today in places like Burma, Rwanda and Syria, where the government of Bashar al-Assad has recaptured most all of the territory once held by rebels, has brought new attention to the problem of how to get aid to the people who actually need it.
'The Assad regime manipulates and exploits U.N. humanitarian assistance to benefit its loyalists and bolster its military operations at the expense of Syrians who are in genuine need,' Kenan Rahmani, advocacy manager at the Washington, D.C.-based Syria Campaign, told Fox News. 'If the U.N. continues to compromise impartiality and independence, donor countries must find new channels to deliver humanitarian aid.'
The Assad government has controlled as much as 90 percent of the aid going to Syria, according to the campaign's investigations in recent years. As of April 2016, 88 percent of food aid went to government-held territory, with just 12 percent to areas outside the regime's control. The number was even higher the previous year, when the government assigned over 99 percent of U.N. aid to its own territories.
According to the campaign's investigations, the Syrian government has from the beginning of the conflict in 2011 allegedly used the explicit threat of revoking the U.N.'s permission to operate within the country's borders. As a result, activists claim, thousands have died of malnutrition-related ailments and lack of medical care..."