Syria - Dr Al-Jaafari: Press Conference - 28 March 2014

29 March 2014



Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN Dr. Bashar al-Jaafari said that the report submitted by UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos on the application of resolution no.2139 on humanitarian affairs is incomplete and lacks credible information.

In a press conference held on Friday in New York following a Security Council closed session to discuss Amos’s report, al-Jaafari said that the report in question ignores the armed terrorist groups’ hindering of humanitarian aid delivery to various area or them opening fire on aid convoys, like what happened in Yarmouk Camp in Damascus.

He said the report also ignores the fact that these terrorist groups continue to besiege some civilian areas and deprive them of essentials, and that they occupy hospitals and turn them into bases for military operations, torture and executions.

Al-Jaafari said that Amos’s report, though better than previous report, failed to mention massacres committed by terrorist, such as the massacre of Adra workers city, nor does it mention the hundreds of innocent civilians, some of them women and children, who were abducted nearly a year in Lattakia’s northern countryside and whom nobody talks about.

He also noted that the report did not mention the need to deal with the crisis in Syria politically, not just deal with the humanitarian aspect, because humanitarian issues cannot be resolved without addressing the political aspect represented by foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs, and supporting terrorists and sending them from around the world under Turkish-Qatari-Saudi-Israeli intelligence support.

Syria’s Permanent Representative pointed out that the Syrian government established a joint committee for cooperating with relevant UN resolutions and coordinate efforts to implement resolution no.2139, yet Amos neglected to mention in her reports any of the achievements made in this regard, including the opening of the Nasibin crossing point on the borders with Turkey to admit 68 trucks so far carrying humanitarian aid to northern Syria, the opening of 5 new UN offices, and providing 400 visas for people working with UN and humanitarian aid organizations, noting that these organizations number over 80 added to 173 national NGOs.

“The fact that the report and some members of the General Secretariat and the Security Council refrain from acknowledging facts on the ground is a bad sign that doesn’t help improve the situation. If they actually want to implement resolution no.2139, they have to deal with the Syrian government, not with terrorist groups,” he said.

Al-Jaafari said that the General Secretariat and some Security Council members don’t want to hear the truth because some of them are deeply involved in escalating terrorism in Syria, and three years into the crisis, they continue to refuse to acknowledge the presence of thousands of terrorists operating in Syria and are allowed to do so because of the massive resources made available to them by Arab and foreign intelligence agencies, not because the Syrian government can’t handle them.

He stressed that the British representative at the UN doesn’t want to acknowledge facts or achievement made via cooperation between the Syrian government and UN organizations, and he denied the presence of terrorists and was content to describe them as “opposition.”

Syria’s Permanent Representative said that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey directly supports terrorist groups in Syria, interferes in Syria’s internal affairs, and escalates terrorism in it, noting that the leaked voice recording of a meeting between senior Turkish officials on fabricating excuses for the aggression on Syria constitutes a major scandal, and the UN must deal with these facts which violate its resolutions in order to understand the reality of what is happening.

He called upon the Security Council to hold the Turkish government responsible for escalating terrorism in Syria, infringing blatantly upon the sovereignty of a UN member state, and allowing terrorists to attack this state from Turkish territories, saying that some sides’ attempts to doubt the authenticity of the recording in question are laughable.

“The Turkish government has been carrying out an aggression against Syria since the beginning of the crisis. The Turkish ambassador at the UN, who used to say before that what we present isn’t worthy of a response, must comment along with his government on this huge scandal which was published by the Turkish media, if he actually has the bravery to respond,” al-Jaafari said.

He asserted that what happened in Kasab was a crime against Syrian civilians, some of them Armenians who fled Ottoman massacres in the 1920s and today face a similar massacre at the hands of the Ottomans’ descendants who used their tanks and artillery to cover Chechen, Saudi, Afghan, Tunisian and other terrorists supported by the dirty money of Qatari-Saudi petroleum to wage their aggression on Kasab.

Al-Jaafari said that Erdogan supported this attack because he fears losing the upcoming elections, so he sought to open an imaginary front and sacrifice the blood of innocent Syrians in Kasab and elsewhere to distract Turkish public opinion from the accumulating mistakes he makes inside Turkey, asserting that this is a double crime that violates Syria’s sovereignty and increases violence on one side and manipulates the interests of the Turkish people on the other side.