Syria in Blackout, Country at a Halt - The DENISE SIMON EXPERIENCE

Lights out in Syria: Nationwide blackout brings country to a halt

DAMASCUS, Syria, March 3 (UPI) — Officials are scrambling to determine the cause of a nationwide blackout in Syria.

“Electricity has been cut across all provinces and teams are trying to determine the reason for this unexpected cut,” state news agency SANA reported. “Engineers and technicians are working on finding out why this sudden power cut happened in order to fix it promptly and restore electricity in the next few hours.”

Although electricity is available for only 2-4 hours a day in war-torn Syria — or not available at all — nationwide blackouts are rare.

The Syrian Telecommunication Establishment said some Internet services have partially halted “as a result of sudden damage to one of the network hubs” and that repair teams are working to fix it.

Syria has been blighted by a complex civil war in which the Islamic State, the Syrian government and multiple Syrian rebel groups fight for control of territory. The Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad has previously blamed blackouts on rebel attacks, while the United Nations has said that electricity has been restricted as a weapon of war.

A cease-fire in the Syrian civil war between the government and rebels that was brokered by the United States and Russia began midnight Friday.

Efforts to relaunch power service could take two to 12 hours, a Ministry of Electricity official said in a video posted online late Thursday afternoon.

Shortly before the reports of the outage, the ministry said on its Facebook page Thursday that militants had hit part of a power-generating station with rockets in the western city of Hama. The Syrian government hasn’t said whether this attack was linked to the nationwide outage; the ministry said maintenance workers were fixing the damage.

CNN: Syria’s power infrastructure has been damaged during the war, accounting in part for frequent outages even in areas that it still serves.

Thursday’s outage came in the middle of a two-week truce between government forces and certain militant groups — a pause in fighting that is meant to allow humanitarian aid to reach people who have been cut off by the war.

U.N. envoy: ‘visible’ progress in Syria truce, success ‘not guaranteed’

Syria’s ceasefire has shown clear signs of progress, the top UN envoy for the war-ravaged country said Thursday, but warned there was no guarantee it would succeed.

“The situation… on the ground could be summarized as fragile. Success is not guaranteed, but progress has been visible,” Staffan de Mistura told reporters in Geneva as the cessation of hostilities entered its sixth day.

The ceasefire brokered by the United States and Russia came into effect on Saturday but does not include territory controlled by the ISIS group or Al-Nusra.

“The level of violence in the country is being greatly reduced. Ask the Syrian people,” de Mistura said.

His comments came shortly before entering a meeting of a UN-backed international task force co-chaired by Moscow and Washington that is overseeing the truce.

“In general, the cessation has been holding,” he said, while acknowledging that “there are still a number of places where fighting has continued,” including in parts of Damascus and Homs.

But the good thing, he stressed, is that incidents of fighting “have been contained”.

As a result of the relative calm, aid workers have been delivering desperately-needed assistance to besieged areas where nearly half a million people are trapped.

Another four million people are living in hard-to-reach areas.

Following a meeting of the task force overseeing the delivery of humanitarian aid, de Mistura’s special advisor Jan Egeland voiced hope that the ceasefire would “lead to a big leap forward… in reaching many hundreds of thousands more people.”

“Considering how it has been, we are obviously making great progress, but there is a lot left to be done,” he told AFP.

In the last three weeks, 236 trucks had been sent out to 115,000 people in besieged areas, he said, adding that by the weekend, aid workers were hoping to have reached another three or four areas in Kfar Batna in the Eastern Ghouta region, which are home to another 20,000 people.

De Mistura has said a new round of peace talks will resume in Geneva on March 9, after his first attempt to engage the warring parties in indirect negotiations floundered last month.

He had been hoping to get started on March 7, but acknowledged that logistical problems, such as finding hotel rooms for participants as the Swiss city hosts one of the world’s biggest car shows, had forced him to push the talks back.

Since the talks would consist of indirect “proximity talks”, participants would not all need to arrive by March 9, with some expected to arrive as late as the 14th, he said.

It might be a good idea to invest in a NBN battery for sale to power backup broadband to improve internet speed and keep locals connected during a blackout. My friend told me that it was really helpful for him in his blackout.

Denise Simon