Al-Jaafari: UN report on Syria’s children ignores facts

Syria slammed the “complete ignoring of facts” flawing a UN report on the situation of children in Syria.

During a Security Council’s session on “Children and Armed Conflicts” held on Thursday, Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari said the report on Syria overlooks the true roots behind the crisis in it and abstains from recognizing the role of the countries in aiding the spread of terrorism and multiplying its grave impact on Syria’s children.

He criticized the “suspicious” disregard by the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Leila Zerrougui and her office of the dozens of documented correspondences and letters sent by the Syrian government providing evidence against the many allegations included in this recent report and others before it.

Al-Jaafari referred to the lists of thousands of incidents with the date, place and names documented, where schools and hospitals were attacked and children were killed at the terrorists’ hands, which were sent to Zerrougui’s office since the beginning of the crisis.

Yet, despite the government’s close cooperation with Zerrougui and her office, not even one of those documented incidents and proofs was heeded in the report, said al-Jaafari.

“Whoever is in charge of writing those reports, they have turned into a tool in the hands of some influential member states of this international organization to smear the Syrian government’s image, ” al-Jaafari said.

This fact, he added, explains the “unjustified rejection” of a demand for listing the Israeli occupation in the report’s attachments as a party responsible for the killing of thousands of Palestinian children in occupied Palestine and the suffering of Syrian children under occupation in the Syrian Golan.

Syria’s Ambassador dismissed all the attempts at “demonizing” the Syrian government and blaming it for terrorism while ignoring the role of the terrorism-backing countries, referring to the camps set up in Syria’s neighboring countries for recruiting children as young as four, which “have taken unprecedented bloody forms”.

He cited video tapes published by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist organization showing children of no more than 10 years of age carrying out mass executions against captives through shooting or decapitating them.

Al-Jaafari also highlighted the terrorists’ approach of educating children in a Takfiri Wahhabi educational system and closing hundreds of government-run schools and turning them into bases for them and centers to store their weapons and ammunition.

The Syrian Representative to the UN reiterated call upon the United Nations to take efficacious measures to bring to account the countries supporting terrorism and enforce the Security Council’s resolutions on countering terrorism, the latest was resolution 2199.

He also called on the UN to support the Syrian government’s efforts towards rehabilitating affected children and integrating them into society and take a stand to stop the war on Syria from being continuously fuelled, which, he warned, would threaten more generations inside and outside Syria who are growing up to the images of blood and violence.

SANA