UNSC failure behind use of drones by some states for terrorist acts: Syria's envoy

Syria says the UN Security Council's silence has emboldened some hostile states and foreign-sponsored Takfiri terrorists to make vast use of unmanned aerial vehicles to launch acts of terrorism and aggression across the Arab country.

Addressing a session for the Human Rights Council on Thursday, Syria's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva Hussam Eddin Ala said the escalation in aerial aggression by the US, Turkey and the Israeli entity had been the direct result of the UNSC failure to stop the terrorist acts which threaten the international peace and and the UN Charter.

Ala went on to say that "any justification of using drones under the pretext of combating terrorism contradicts the international law and sovereignty of the states".

Citing reports by media and international organizations, he said some outlawed terrorist outfits operating in Syria have obtained drone technologies.

In December 2018, a media report said that terrorists from the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham Takfiri terrorist group, formerly known as al-Nusra Front, had gained access to 100 unmanned aerial vehicles through a Turkish merchant to use them in chemical attacks against Syrian government forces in the country’s Northwestern Province of Idlib.

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, then told the Arabic service of Russia’s Sputnik news agency that the drones had been transported from the city of Harem, which lies close to the border with Turkey, to a militant position in the town of Ma'arrat Misrin.

The Syrian envoy also said "the assassination of Iran's top anti-terror Commander, Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, who had played a key role in combating terrorism in the region, with a US drone had been a clear example of state terrorism."

A UN special rapporteur on Thursday said that the US had put the world at unprecedented peril with its assassination of Soleimani earlier this year, warning that it was high time the international community broke its silence on Washington’s drone-powered unlawful killings.