Idlib Siege Prompts UN Security Council Members to Urge Action
Idlib Siege Prompts UN Security Council Members to Urge Action
(Bloomberg) -- A majority of nations on the United Nations Security Council asked Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Wednesday to take urgent action to halt the violence in northwest Syria, according to diplomats familiar with the matter.
Ambassadors representing nine of the council’s 15 members personally delivered a petition to Guterres’ office on Wednesday urging him to launch an immediate initiative to secure a cease-fire in northwest Syria, the diplomats said.
Backed by Russian air power, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have regained much of the country and captured dozens of villages in Idlib in recent days. The fighting has sparked the latest humanitarian crisis in the nine-year-old conflict, with more than 948,000 people being displaced in the northwestern province since December, the UN said Wednesday.
The U.K., France, U.S., Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Tunisia, Niger, and the Dominican Republic made the formal diplomatic petition, known in UN parlance as a demarche, in an effort to draw urgency to the matter and force action despite a deadlock in the Security Council. Russia and China, both veto-wielding members, have shielded Assad’s government from action at the council since the conflict started in 2011.
Guterres’ spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the secretary-general, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday in Geneva, has been pushing for a ceasefire publicly and privately. The “Secretary-General has two clear objectives,” he added by email. “Stopping the killings and getting humanitarian aid in. He’s been working towards these goals tirelessly through ongoing contacts with all the relevant parties.”
The Security Council group told Guterres they are “gravely concerned” that hostilities are approaching densely populated areas and that civilians are getting caught up in the violence. They praised Guterres’ recent calls for a cease-fire and urged a halt in violence that will allow for the protection of civilians, uphold international humanitarian law, and ensure “safe, unhindered and impartial” cross-border UN aid to civilians.
The diplomatic move follows a demarche last year by two-thirds of the council, in which they pushed Guterres to investigate attacks on UN facilities in northwest Syria. After that petition, Guterres decided to form a board of inquiry, angering the Russians. He still hasn’t released the results of that inquiry.
Because of the potential for humanitarian catastrophe, the province was declared a de-escalation zone along with three other areas under a 2017 agreement between Russia, Turkey and Iran, the outside powers warring in the country. Military posts were established to monitor flare-ups of violence. But frustrated by a lack of progress on eliminating the rebel threat, Russia accused Turkey of failing to abide by its agreements on Idlib and sought to justify the advance on the holdout as an antiterrorism operation.
“It is atrocious what’s going on there,” U.S. Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker said during a press briefing in Washington on Wednesday. “This is intentional and atrocities are being perpetrated. It’s an outrage.”
--With assistance from Glen Carey.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Wainer in New York at dwainer3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net
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