By François Koundounou
Rabat – The horrendous Syrian civil war has caused over 400,000 deaths in seven years, according to a high-ranking official at the UN, who then went on to accuse the Damascus regime of planning “the apocalypse.”
In a speech he gave before the UN’s Council for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, who is the high commissioner for human rights, said that the year 2017 alone witnessed more than 1000 bombings.
The situation keeps deteriorating, escalating, and transforming into a “hell on earth,” the high commissioner said, in reference to the recent escalations in east Ghouta, near the Syrian capital. “Recent attempts to justify indiscriminate and brutal attacks against thousands of civilians are legally and morally unacceptable,” al-Hussein said, as he referred to the mass killings of civilians while supposedly targeting combatants. He added: “This month, … the situation in east Ghouta that has been described by UN Secretary General as a hell on earth.”
Following the Human Rights Council’s recent decision to investigate on the causes and scale of the horrifying death toll in Ghouta, Great Britain presented a resolution that indicated the absence of sustainable humanitarian aid in the region, as well as the recent use of chemical weapons. A UN-led investigation supported Britain’s resolution, saying that there are indications that some recent deaths in Ghouta were due to the use of chemical weapons, with two children among victims.
On Tuesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that he is “preoccupied” by the escalating situation in Syria. “A convoy of UN agencies, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, and an international Red Cross committee, who were providing vital humanitarian aids to 27,500 needy people in Douma, in east Ghouta, were unable to do so because of insecurity,” said the spokesperson for the UN Secretary General.
Guterres is also reported to have “exhorted” all involved parties “to put in application, without further ado, UN Security Council resolution 2401,” in order to stop further escalation of the already horrifying humanitarian crisis.
