Al-Jaafari Calls for Pressuring Terrorism Sponsors to Abandon Their Support for Terrorists in Syria, Urges Holding them Accountable
NEW YORK- Over the past four years, the armed terrorist organizations in Syria have sought assassinating the innocence of childhood aiming to create takfir and hatred-based extremist environment through imposing terrorist education, Syria’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations Bashar al-Jaafari has underscored.
In a statement at a Security Council session on “Children and Armed Conflicts”, al-Jaafari urged pressuring the governments of the countries sponsoring terrorism to abandon their policies of supporting terrorists with money, arms and training. He also called for taking effective procedures to hold these governments accountable and to enforce the Security Council’s resolutions on combating terrorism.
“In Syria and in the refugee camps set in neighboring countries, children are being recruited in unprecedented bloody ways that even four years old children are being involved under the suspicious silence of some parties and the collusion of others, a matter that increases and legalizes terrorism so it expanded worldwide,” al-Jaafari said.
He added that the Syrian delegation at the Security Council has repeatedly warned against recruiting Syrian children in areas controlled by the armed terrorist organizations like (ISIL), al-Nousra Front, the Islamic Front, Islam Army, the so-called Free Army or other terrorist groups.
“In these areas, the terrorist organizations brainwashed the children and trained them on fighting in accordance with criminal Fatwas. They deprived children from normal education and are forced to follow terrorism education. They stopped education in some Syrian areas aiming to amend the government’s curricula as to cope with their own religious rules. As a result more than 670 thousand Syrian students were deprived from education,” he clarified.
The Syrian diplomat went on to say that the terrorist groups have turned the schools and the hospitals into detention and execution centers and into barracks after looting their contents. He referred to the increase of the terrorist attacks launched by the terrorist groups, which some like to call “moderate opposition”, on residential areas, schools, hospitals and infrastructure claiming the lives of many innocent people most of them were children.
Regarding the Syrian government’s procedures to protect its citizens, particularly children, al-Jaafari said the government has adopted all necessary procedures which prevent the recruitment of kids in fighting activities of any kind, noting that a legislative decree was issued on May 6th, 2013 for this purpose and that the Ministry of Social Affairs was keen on ensuring safe place for children liberated after being abducted and recruited by the terrorists.
Al-Jaafari stressed that “despite the huge efforts being exerted by the Syrian government as to protect the Syrian children from the destructive narrow-minded Wahhabi thinking, such kind of terrorist crimes can’t be eliminated except through collective and sincere efforts to uproot this thinking.”
The Syrian ambassador, who called for helping the Syrian government rehabilitate the victimized children and integrate them into their societies, clarified that the issue of recruiting children by terrorist organizations has become a global question that needs radical solutions through uprooting the organized terrorism which spread in several countries including Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Central Africa, Mali and Colombia where the legal governments in these countries try every day to eliminate this terrorism.
Hamda Mustafa