Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Bhashar Ja’afary said during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council that the Syrian government is ready to resume peace talks without preconditions while stressing that the war-torn-country “will not become another Libya or Iraq.”
“Mr. President, My country is ready to resume intra-Syrian dialogue with no preconditions and according to decisions and foundations that launched this very dialogue, in order to reach a political solution that is decided by the Syrians. Syrians alone with no foreign intervention or interference so that Syrians can decide their future and their options and this can be done by Syrian leadership in a manner that would guarantee the sovereignty of Syria and its territorial integrity. Syria will not become another Libya or Iraq. We will never allow this,” said Ja’afri.
The cessation of hostilities, which was brokered by Washington and Moscow, joined the fate of previous attempts, as warring parties abandoned the international effort for peace and resumed battles in a conflict which rages for some 5.5 years and has claimed the lives of more than half a million people.
At the same meeting of the UN Security Council, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault distributed a document outlining a new mechanism to monitor the last-failed ceasefire – a move Paris hopes will re-establish a nationwide cessation of hostilities that would allow all warring parties involved to focus on combating the Islamic State and other Islamist organizations.
“Because we must resist the temptation to point the finger at one another. This has led to the failure of previous agreements and it hasn’t enabled us to create a climate of trust. There’s too much mistrust and I felt this at the meeting this morning. We have to create favorable conditions for this to advance, so I have proposed a new monitoring mechanism and distributed to all members of the Security Council the non-paper that we have prepared for discussion,” said Ayrault.
Paris hopes to see an existing monitoring task force in Syria, that has lacked teeth, replaced by a panel of experts of countries in the International Syrian Contact Group, that includes the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Britain and France, in an effort to advance a plan that would require warring parties in Syria to uphold to a new ceasefire, which would allow a resumption of talks toward a political solution.