U.S. to Send Disaster Relief Team Into Libya, Official Says
The U.S. Agency for International Development “soon” will send a team into rebel-held territory in Libya to provide humanitarian relief, a top official said.
“The planning is well advanced for moving them inside” Benghazi, the unofficial capital of the opponents of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, said Mark Ward, the agency’s deputy assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.
One of the team’s first tasks will be to contact those opposed to Qaddafi, including the National Transitional Council, to coordinate the delivery of relief, Ward said at a news conference in Washington.
“The local forces, the local opposition, is going to know a lot about access through ports, they’re going to know a lot about what we can bring in by air, and they’re going to know a lot about which roads are open, which ones are safe, for the delivery of humanitarian commodity,” he said.
Ward said the agency already is in contact with the opposition members in eastern Libya. He wouldn’t specify when the U.S. team will enter the country, or how many personnel will be involved. A disaster assistance response team, or DART, can have two to two dozen members, or more, he said.
There will be no security personnel accompanying the team, Ward said. “My DART wears shoes, not boots,” he said.
The agency said March 14 that its plans to send a team into Benghazi had been delayed.
400,000 Fled
More than 400,000 people, including medical personnel such as doctors and nurses, have fled the country since the fighting began, Ward said.
The U.S. has pledged almost $50 million in humanitarian assistance, Ward said. Much of the funding has gone toward evacuating citizens and helping migrants, he said.
The agency has helped non-government organizations that are positioning food and medical supplies outside embattled cities so they can be distributed when security improves, a tactic that quickly improved conditions in Ajdabiya, Ward said.
In cities in the east, “the food situation is good. The water situation is good. They do have access to medical care,” he said. “Sadly, that is not the case in cities to the west.”
Misrata, which Ward described as under siege, “is the city that we are most concerned about in terms of a population in need of humanitarian assistance,” he said. “The casualties there are a more urgent need” because of the fighting, he said.
The United Nations, the U.K., Turkey and other countries are helping to provide medical assistance in Libya, Ward said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Brendan McGarry in Washington bmcgarry2@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net.
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