France: Humanitarian crisis looms in rebel-held Idlib
Assad says his kids visited holiday camp in Crimea
PARIS/MOSCOW (Reuters) – French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned of a humanitarian disaster in the Syrian city of Idlib.
The northwestern Idlib region remains the largest populated area of Syria in the hands of insurgents fighting the Damascus government. In recent years, tens of thousands of fighters and civilians have fled there from areas the army has recaptured with the help of Russia and Iran.
Le Drian said Idlib now has some two million inhabitants.
“There is a risk of a new humanitarian disaster. Idlib’s fate must be settled by a political process, which includes disarming the militias,” Le Drian said in an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.
Some insurgent officials have said they feared an onslaught against Idlib, which a senior Iranian official has indicated could be the next target.
He added that France would also keep a close eye on the situation in northeastern Syria, which was freed from Islamic State with French help.
“Let’s not forget that our principal enemy remains Islamic State, as well as other terrorist groups which are currently regrouping in the east of the country,” Le Drian said.
The insurgents controlling Idlib include both jihadist factions and nationalist FSA rebels. The dominant force there is Hayat Tahrir al Sham, an Islamist alliance spearheaded by the former al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
Le Drian also said Russia was denying reality in Syria and that its protection of President Bashar Assad could not be justified.
“There is a denial of reality, and we have seen this several times. Already in 2013 and then again in 2017 the Russians denied that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons,” he said.
He said that at the time, verification mechanisms already put in place by the United Nations had placed responsibility on the regime.
“It is no wonder that Russia voted against the renewal of this mechanism last autumn,” he said, adding that when France proposed to put in place a comparable mechanism, Russia had vetoed it.
Meanwhile, Russia’s RIA news agency cited a Russian lawmaker as saying on Sunday that Assad’s children visited a holiday camp in Russian-annexed Crimea last year.
Assad met a group of Russian lawmakers in Damascus on Sunday after the West launched missile strikes over a suspected poison gas attack.
Lawmaker Dmitry Sablin told RIA that Assad had said his children visited the Artek holiday camp in Crimea last year. Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, a move that prompted US and European sanctions.
“My children were at Artek last year. After the trip they began to understand Russia better,” Sablin quoted Assad as saying.
Assad has two sons and a daughter. Syria’s ambassador to Moscow said last year that the children had started learning to speak Russian, according to Russian media reports.