Ambassador Ala: Military Operations in Eastern Ghouta Target Terrorist Groups

GENEVA-Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Hussam Eddin Ala, said that the military operations in Eastern Ghouta target terrorist groups and have been carried out in compliance with the international humanitarian law, SANA reported.

Responding to accusations made by the UN Higher Commissioner for Human Rights to Syria in his report submitted to the Human Rights Council, Ambassador Ala said that the Higher Commissioner is still determined to give himself the right to give lessons to countries, offend them and go far beyond his mandate stipulated in resolution 48/141 in terms of the necessity of respecting the national sovereignty of states, and continued to adopt politicized views against certain countries and overlook others relying on considerations that only the Commissioner himself knows.

 Ambassador Ala added that the information presented in the Higher Commissioner’s  briefing on Syria give a clear example of politically-motivated accusations, as sometimes we find him circulating fake allegations that Syria is deliberately targeting civilians in order to deny its right to fight terrorism, and other times he adopts false statements about Syria that were devoid of the minimum of objectivity.

Despite Syria’s commitment to the daily humanitarian truce, terrorists continue to randomly shell the capital Damascus which necessitates that the Syrian state has to fulfill its duty in dealing with such situation,” said Ala, adding that in parallel, a secure corridor has  been set up in order to ensure a safe evacuation of civilians willing to leave the Eastern Ghouta and provide them with their needs.

“Those measures, which the High Commissioner has criticized in his statement, are the same measures the United Nations usually calls for being implemented in such cases,” Ambassador Ala said.

Ala called on the Higher Commissioner to conduct an assessment of the humanitarian situation in Raqqa city in which 125 people have been killed due to the impacts of the US aerial bombardment, a fact that was acknowledged by the UN’s humanitarian point man for Syria, Jan Egeland.

He also urged the Higher Commissioner to investigate the brutal Turkish aggression on Afrin, if he wants to maintain his credibility.