The UN special envoy for Syria said Monday that the country has become a haven for “mercenaries, terrorists and drug traffickers”.
“The Syrian people continue to suffer from violence and human rights abuses this year,” Gair Pedersen told members of the UN Security Council. “Syria continues to exude instability – a haven for mercenaries, drug trafficking and terrorism,” Pederson said, adding that the war-torn country remains fragmented and debris is being removed. In addition, he warned that hunger and poverty have escalated as the economy continues to collapse, leaving 14 million people below the poverty line, the highest number since the conflict began in 2011.
He added that “13 million Syrians remain displaced inside and outside the country – many of their children do not know their homeland – and their prospects for a safe, dignified and voluntary return are not improving.”
Syria has been plagued by civil war since early 2011, when Bashar al-Assad’s regime attacked protesters who then took to the streets in favor of democracy. says the number is “definitely higher”.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), some 6.6 million Syrians have been forced to flee the country over the past decade. Turkey alone hosts about 4 million people, more than any other country in the world. Earlier this month, a report noted that Assad’s relatives and associates had turned Syria into a “new drug state in the Mediterranean.”
All this at a time when Russia and the Assad regime have recently come under pressure to recognize the use of chemical weapons. Damascus has not yet declared its chemical weapons and has not accepted inspectors, said the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Fernando Arias.
Nervous poisoning of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in Russia, meanwhile, continues to pose a “serious threat” to global efforts to eliminate chemical weapons, Arias added.
Syria denies using chemical weapons and insists it has surrendered its weapons stockpile under a 2013 deal with the United States and Russia sparked by a suspected sarin gas attack that killed 1,400 people in the Damascus suburb of Guta.
“To date, Syria has not completed any of these measures,” Arias told the meeting, adding that its statements “can not yet be considered accurate and complete.” Damascus also continued to deny visas to an OAXO weapons inspector, prompting the organization to refuse to deploy a team there, Arias said.
Russia, meanwhile, has been accused of failing to answer questions about Navalny’s 2020 poisoning of Navalny, which the Kremlin has blamed on Western powers. the contract “, said Arias.
Moscow had asked OAXO inspectors to come to Russia for an investigation, but Arias said the visit did not take place because of conditions set by Russian authorities that were stricter than those imposed by other countries.
Meanwhile, London and Washington have been pushing Moscow and Damascus for chemical weapons in recent months. “We again urge Russia and the Assad regime to live up to their obligations,” said Bonnie Jenkins, the US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, in a statement.
For her part, British Defense Secretary Annabelle Goldie said Russia should not only answer questions about Navalny, but also the poisoning of former KGB agent Sergei Skripal from Novitsok in Salisbury in 2018. “There is no reason,” he said. “An explanation for these poisonings is in addition to Russian involvement and responsibility,” Goldie said. Moscow always denies involvement in either case.
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