Bashar al-Jaafari, Syria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, addressed the UN this week, saying that Turkey and Saudi Arabia should account for their own involvement in the Syrian conflict before leveling “null and baseless accusations to the Syrian government”. Syria’s government has been accused of chemical attacks in northern Syria in recent months, Syrian Arab News Agency reported.
Speaking before the UN’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security at the UN General Assembly on Friday, al-Jaafari accused the countries of being “directly involved in providing these terrorist organizations with chemical weapons,” the source said.
He also criticized the states for supplying the Syrian opposition with financing and weaponry, claiming that Turkey alone provided support for 106 militant organizations active in Syria. This, he said, includes open state support for the Free Syrian Army. Al-Jaafari commented that instead of lending “a helping hand to Syria to overcome the crisis...this Turkish government...became one of the main support bases for these terrorist organizations,” the source noted.
Al-Jaafari proposed that the UN Arms Trade Treaty should be updated to account for the illicit trafficking of small and light arms, noting the need to “utterly [prohibit] supplying weapons to non-state elements and armed terrorist organizations. Facts which we are witnessing today in Syria and in a number of countries in the region and outside it prove the veracity of our concerns regarding the aforementioned treaty,” he said.
Ambassador’s Statements Follow US Vice President’s Forthright Comments
Ambassador al-Jaafari made his comments in the aftermath of candid remarks by US Vice President Joe Biden, who criticized Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for supporting radical fighters in Syria.
Speaking at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Forum on October 2, Biden noted that the US allies were “so determined to take down Assad” that “they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad –except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of Jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” the Washington Post reported.
Biden said that even despite al-Nusra’s classification as a terrorist organization by the US State Department early on in the conflict, “we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”
The Vice President has since apologized for his remarks, but his frankness lead Foreign Policy to title their piece on the subject “Joe Biden Is the Only Honest Man in Washington.”
The Islamic State, which today controls large swathes of Iraq and Syria, had previously been affiliated with al-Nusra, Al Qaeda’s front in Syria, before the two split in early 2013. Armed clashes between the two began at the start of this year.
http://en.ria.ru/world/20141011/193963471/Turkey-Saudi-Arabia-Must-Stop-Supporting--Jihadi-Militants-in.html
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