Syria Red Crescent delivers aid to besieged town of Al-Tal

As conditions have continued to deteriorate in other sieges across the country, Syria's Red Crescent on Tuesday delivered aid to a town under government siege outside the capital Damascus, aid workers and a monitor said.

"The Syrian Arab Red Crescent today entered al-Tal, and delivered 14 trucks of aid provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross," said ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek.

He said the delivery included food and hygiene kits for some 3,500 families, as well as 25 metric tonnes of bulk food for a collective kitchen in the town.

Al-Tal, a rebel-controlled town north of Damascus, has been besieged by Syrian government forces and Hebollah since July of last year, according to Siege Watch, a siege monitoring project. 

The issue of sieges in Syria's war has been a key sticking point at fresh talks being convened in Geneva on a political solution to the conflict.

The leading Syrian opposition group has called for the international community to implement UN resolutions that would both end sieges on Syrian communities and also see air strikes on civilians halted before it will begin indirect peace talks.

While the UN puts the number of Syrians besieged by the government, rebels or the Islamic State group at 486,700, Siege Watch puts the figure at more than a million while NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF), says the figure could be up to two million.

Syrian activists and aid workers have criticised the UN for downplaying the number of Syrians besieged in order to keep relations with the Syrian government relatively positive in order to have hope of gaining access to besieged areas in the future.

Across Syria, sieges are being imposed by all sides to the conflict, however, the majority of the sieges are maintained by pro-government forces.

Last year, only 10 percent of all UN requests for convoys to besieged areas - and areas the UN defines as "hard-to-reach" - were approved and delivered.

The issue has gained increasing prominence with reports of dozens of deaths from starvation in the town of Madaya, which is under government siege.

Since two high-profile aid deliveries to Madaya in January, however, at least 16 more people have died in the town.

Eight others died in the past month in Moadamiya al-Sham, another surburb of Damascus, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The town has been under siege by government and pro-government militias since August 2012, according to Siege Watch. 

Despite a truce deal in 2014, humanitarian conditions in the town, also the site of a 2013 chemical weapons attack, have sharply deteriorated, the UN OCHA said on Sunday.