Syria presents foreign terrorists list to UN
Syria has presented the UN Security Council a list of 143 foreign citizens killed in Syria fighting government troops. Damascus hopes the move will force the UN to declare the presence of foreign nationals in Syria to be international terrorism,according to Russia Today.
The Syrian government reportedly presented proof that citizens of 19 different nations had fought in the country alongside terrorists
Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s permanent representative to the United Nations, wrote a letter the Security Council requesting they register the list of mercenaries as an official document on the UN’s agenda of “measures to combat international terrorism.”
Last month, Syria delivered a previous version of the list containing 108 names.
The new list contains the names of citizens from 19 countries accused of joining Syria’s rebels: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Chad, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Yemen and Chechnya.
The list consists of the names of people who were positively identified through ID or documents found on their bodies that helped establish their nationality. The bulk of the dead mercenaries in Syria are apparently still unidentified.
Syrian officials have frequently claimed that there are a sizable number of foreign terrorists from various Middle Eastern and North African countries among the terrorists Damascus has said that the mercenaries infiltrated Syria through Turkey.
Syrian state TV aired several reports in recent months affirming that the army has captured Al Qaeda-linked mercenaries from Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, Tunisia and Yemen.
In July, Dutch photo journalist Jeroen Oerlemans and British photographer John Cantlie were captured and held hostage in Syria for a week by terrorists. They claimed that several of their captors spoke English with recognizable regional British accents, like Birmingham and London.
The ongoing crisis in Syria started in March 2011 .
M.D