DAMASCUS (Dispatches) – Syria reserves the right to take back control of the Golan Heights occupied by the Zionist regime, the country’s Foreign Minister has told the United Nations.
During a meeting with visiting UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix and Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific Mohamed Khaled Khiari in Damascus on Tuesday, Faisal Mekdad stressed “the need for the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) to stand committed to its mandate as stipulated in UN Security Council Resolution 242.”
UNDOF is a United Nations peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between the Zionist regime and Syria in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Zionist War.
The Syrian foreign minister, however, added that the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces in the territory cannot replace an optimal solution to the problem.
“The presence of peacekeeping forces can’t by any means substitute a final solution to the problem of [Zionist] occupation. Syria has an inalienable right to return the occupied Syrian Golan Heights to the motherland,” the Syrian foreign minister said.
Mekdad rejected remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the Golan Heights, stating they ignore the UN resolutions which recognize the region as an occupied Syrian territory.
Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on June 7 that the United States accepts that the Zionist regime controls the Golan regardless of legality.
The Zionist regime seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the closing stages of its 1967 Six-Day War with Arab countries, which also saw the regime occupy the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East al-Quds and the Gaza Strip.
Tel Aviv unilaz formed purportedly to fight Daesh.
The statement, which was released following a conference of the military alliance’s foreign ministers, claimed the participants reaffirmed their “shared determination to continue the fight against Daesh/ISIS, and to create conditions for the enduring defeat of the terrorist group, which remains the coalition’s sole purpose.”
The Syrian ministry expressed regret that some foreign ministers of the coalition member states had to agree to and underwrite two statements crafted by the United States and a number of its allies without having the chance to peruse them.