UN's used sanctioned Syrian airliner to move resource to Libya
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| Officers offloading humanitarian resource from a Cham Wings flight to Benina International Airport in Benghazi |
The United Nations has showed to Middle East Eye that it used a US-sanctioned Syrian airline accused of ferrying opponents and guns on behalf of Bashar al-Assad and Khalifa Haftar to move useful resource to Libya.
Images published on Twitter through the UN's World Health Organisation on Monday confirmed officers offloading humanitarian resource from a Cham Wings flight to Benina International Airport in Benghazi.
'Due to the state of affairs at the ground, the alternatives for air freight shipping into Libya are minimal' - World Food Programme
In 2016, americaA Treasury located sanctions on Cham Wings for cooperating "with Government of Syria officers to move militants to Syria to combat on behalf of the Syrian regime and assisted the previously-detailed Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI) in transferring guns and device for the Syrian regime".
The Treasury stated the airline acted on behalf of the Quds Force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' foreign places unit that has performed a first-rate position in propping up Assad withinside the Syrian civil war.
"Cham Wings’s Damascus-to-Dubai flight turned into one of the major routes SMI used to launder cash in the course of the region, with SMI paying all events worried to make certain they might keep to do enterprise with the Assad regime," the Treasury stated.
A spokesperson from the World Food Programme (WFP), which offers with the UN agencies' COVID-19 response, informed MEE that it used the airline to move sixteen metric tonnes of resource from the UAE to Libya.
"Due to the state of affairs at the ground, the alternatives for air freight shipping into Libya are minimal, and on this case, the WHO clinical shipment turned into transported with the aid of using the air service Chams Wings, which isn't problem to United Nations sanctions," the WFP spokesperson stated.
Based in Damascus, Chams Wings Airline is majority-owned through Syrian billionaire Rami Makhlouf, Assad's cousin who till a current falling out changed into the maximum effective businessman withinside the country.
Though the airline isn't always sanctioned through the United Nations, a UN panel of specialists diagnosed closing yr that among 1 January and 10 March, there were least 33 Cham Wings flights from Damascus to Benghazi, probable wearing Syrian mercenaries in contravention of an worldwide palms ban on Libya.
The flights got here at the peak of japanese commander Haftar's failed attack on Tripoli, at some stage in which he hired Russian and Sudanese mercenaries, in addition to pro-Assad militiamen.