As the Syrian civil war grinds on and the Syrian opposition struggles to speak with a unified voice, a new institution has developed to help international donors deliver urgently needed humanitarian assistance to areas outside Syrian government control.

Mark Ward, a senior adviser to the State Department on aid to Syria, told Al-Monitor in an interview Thursday [June 27], that the so-called Assistance Coordination Unit (ACU), has become a crucial partner in assessing Syrian needs and determining where supplies such as food and medicine should go.

Created in November under the initial leadership of Suhair al-Atassi, a vice president of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces — the opposition group with the greatest international recognition — the ACU has gone from a staff of two to 170 personnel, Ward said.

“What we have today is absolutely essential to the international community in terms of an organization that we can bounce ideas off of,” he said. “The donor countries now have someone to ground truth and validate their ideas.”