Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife Asma visited on Friday survivors from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated parts of northern Syria early Monday.
Syrian official websites published images of Assad and his wife while checking on the injured at the Aleppo University Hospital, in their first visit to a region stricken by an earthquake that has killed thousands in the country.
Assad accused the Western policy of lacking humanity.
“The human feeling is absent in the West,” he said, adding that such position had never existed in Western policy, neither now nor in the past.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government on Friday said it had approved the delivery of humanitarian aid to areas outside its control in the quake-hit opposition-held northwest of the country, five days following the devastating earthquake.
“The Council of Ministers approves... the delivery of humanitarian aid to all parts of the Syrian Arab Republic,” a cabinet statement said.
It added that aid distribution should be supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Syrian Red Crescent with UN help.
Monday’s earthquake affected five Syrian governorates: Idlib, Aleppo, Latakia, Hama and Tartous.
Syria's politically isolated Assad has received calls and aid from leaders of several countries since the earthquake.
Aid planes have also successively landed at the airports of Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia.
Assad's visit to Aleppo came at a time when civil and governmental associations and volunteer teams continued campaigns to collect financial and in-kind donations and to send aid convoys to the affected areas.
