Sanctions Violate Syria’s Sovereignty, Support Terrorism: UN Envoy

Date: 31 July 2020 - 22:09

News ID: ۸۱۲۲۳

DAMASCUS (Dispatches) – Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar al-Jaafari has denounced the Western economic sanctions against his country, saying the coercive measures are used as a pretext to keep up violations of Syrian sovereignty and support the terrorist groups wreaking havoc on the Arab country.
Addressing a Security Council session via video link, Jafari said the financial restrictions by Western states against his country and their attempts to hinder efforts to deliver aid to Syria expose their fake humanitarian claims.
"The motive behind all that is to find pretexts to continue violation of Syria’s sovereignty, threaten its territorial integrity, supporting the terrorist organizations,” Ja’afari said.
This month, he said, the Security Council has witnessed "feverish Western endeavors” to extend a 2014 resolution on aid delivery to Syria.
"The motive behind that is not to bring in aid to needy people, but to continue violation of Syria’s sovereignty, threaten its territorial integrity which contradicts with the General Assembly Resolution No. 46/182,” he said.
After three attempts, the UNSC finally voted to extend aid deliveries to Syria for a year through a single border crossing from Turkey within the framework of a 2014 mechanism. Russia and China abstained from voting.
Ja’afari noted that countries hostile to Syria have not stopped their documented grave violations of the UN Charter and international law, nor have they stopped perpetrating crimes against the Syrian people, plundering the country’s resources and besieging and starving its people.
Besides all those crime, they also launch acts of aggression on civil passenger planes that cross the Syrian airspace in a flagrant violation of international law and international civil aviation rules, he added.
In another development, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the deaths of "300 Russians” in a failed attack on a military base held by U.S. and mainly Kurdish militants in Syria’s oil-rich eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr more than two years ago sent a warning to Moscow.
Speaking at a Senate hearing , Pompeo sought to forestall criticism over President Donald Trump’s statement that he had not raised with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin accusations that Moscow paid the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.