15 January 2015 – With the “devastating conflict” in Syria entering its fourth year, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria said today that continued fighting in the country is a “disgrace” that has set the country back 40 years.
“It is a true tragedy that people all over Syria continue to be living under constant fear of barrel bombs, mortar attacks, rockets, aerial bombing, car bombs, kidnappings, extrajudicial killings,” said Staffan de Mistura.
“We are starting 2015 with the Syrian conflict being the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.”
He noted that Syrians had replaced Afghans as the world’s largest population of refugees, pointing to the 7.6 million displaced people and 3.3 million refugees created by the conflict, as well as a further 12 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. Diseases like polio, typhoid and measles had returned to the country, he said, and 4,000 schools were unusable, meaning 3 million children were out of school.
“In 2015, this year, Syria had been expected to be one of the five top performers on the economic side in the Arab world, now it is the second before the last, just before Somalia,” he said.
Recent developments underlined the need for action, he said, pointing to the pressures faced by Syria’s neighbors as a result of flooding by refugees, to the recent terrorist attack in Paris, which connected to the origins and consequences of the Syria conflict, and to the presence of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in large parts of Syria and Iraq.
“The rest of the world is not immune,” he said. “This is why we cannot avoid raising a flag today of an urgent concern. This is why we are using in the beginning of the year to start saying let’s make this year, as I am hearing from many political leaders, an opportunity.”
He urged implementation of UN Security Council resolutions on humanitarian access, foreign fighters and terrorist groups and he urged support for the proposal of a freeze to heavy fighting in Aleppo “because [the city] is a symbolic microcosm of all of Syria, because it has the highest number of displaced people, because it has seen two years of suffering, because while the Government and the opposition continue being involved in heavy fighting between them, [ with ISIL] only 20 miles away from Aleppo.”