The head of a Syrian rescue organisation appealed to the UN Security Council on Friday to stop indiscriminate barrel bomb attacks he says have escalated dramatically and are mainly killing civilians.
Syrian Civil Defense searches for survivors but more often finds bodies in the rubble left by what it says are barrel bombs dropped from Syrian government helicopters.
The Security Council has been bitterly divided over Syria between Russia, a close ally of president Bashar Assad’s government, and western nations who have have campaigned for a transitional government leading to democratic elections.
Raed Saleh, head of the SCD, told the UN’s most powerful body that “the Security Council in the eyes of those suffering has become a non-Security Council” because it has not implemented its February 2014 resolution demanding an end to indiscriminate use of weapons in populated areas, including barrel bombs.
“The Syrian people who are killed day after day hold you responsible and call on you to take the necessary measures to put an end to the killing in Syria, particularly the use of indiscriminate weapons,” he told an informal council meeting on Friday focusing on the increasing use of barrel bombs in the Syrian war, now well into its fifth year with well over 200,000 killed.
Assad has denied Syria uses barrel bombs but western organisations have provided video footage of Syrian helicopters dropping such bombs.
Saleh said council action should include a no-fly zone to stop the dropping of barrel bombs. He said he did not want to return to Syria without an answer from the council. But he did not get one.
Russian counsellor Andrey Listov, who previously lived in Syria and said he loved the country, told the council the responsibility for the current situation “falls on those who finance and arm terrorists”.
Russia condemns indiscriminate attacks wherever they happen, he said. But “any measures that the Security Council is going to implement against those indiscriminate attacks … should not impede the efforts of the government to fight terrorism”.
The meeting, organised by France’s UN ambassador Francois Delattre and Spain’s UN ambassador Roman Oyarzun Marchesi, followed appeals from more than 70 countries and over 80 international human rights and aid groups for immediate council action against the use of barrel bombs in Syria.
Pressured on whether there be a new council resolution, he said: “We’re working. We’re working.”
Bassam Alahmad, head of research at the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, said Russian “condemnation is important” but the Syrian people want action against the targeting of civilians. From the beginning of 2015 until Thursday, there has been an upsurge in the number of victims – 1,160 civilians killed by Syrian barrel bombs including 290 children and 160 women.
