Obama downplays quick military action
GENEVA — U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday played down the prospect of speedy military intervention in Syria without international co-operation and a legal mandate — the same day it was announced that the number of child refugees fleeing the war-torn country has topped one million.
Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said Obama has asked the Pentagon to provide military options in light of allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians. While Hagel declined to discuss any specific force movements, U.S. defence officials said the navy moved a fourth warship into the region.
Obama, meanwhile, was cautious. “If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it — do we have the coalition to make it work?” Obama said. “Those are considerations that we have to take into account.”
An alleged chemical weapons attack on Wednesday, believed to have killed at least 100 people in a Damascus suburb, would amount to the most heinous use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja 2-½ decades ago.
Obama said the episode is a “big event of grave concern” that requires American attention.
Obama’s comments came hours after the U.N. announced Syria’s grim refugee milestone.
Antonio Guterres, the head of the Office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the figure means as many Syrian children have now been uprooted from their homes or families as the number of children who live in Wales, or in Boston and Los Angeles combined.
“Can you imagine Wales without children? Can you imagine Boston and Los Angeles without children?” Guterres told reporters in Geneva.
Roughly half of all the nearly two million registered refugees from Syria are children and 740,000 of those are under the age of 11, according to the U.N. refugee and children’s agencies.
Guterres said the horrors of war experienced by these children puts them in grave danger of becoming a “lost generation.” With emotion he recounted some of his personal visits with Syrian child refugees, including seeing one compulsively shoot a toy gun and others who drew pictures of dead children, planes with bombs and destroyed homes.
“This is totally unacceptable,” he said. “They will be paying for it the rest of their lives.”
Yoka Brandt, deputy head of the U.N. children’s agency known as UNICEF, called the exodus from Syria’s civil war “truly a children’s crisis. And the unacceptable thing is that it is children who have nothing to do with this crisis that are paying the price.”
But the children’s ordeals are not over once they escape Syria, Guterres said.