Security Council calls for eradicating ISIL safe havens in Syria and Iraq

The Security Council votes on a resolution. UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

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20 November 2015 – The United Nations Security Council this evening called on all countries that can do so to take the war on terrorism to Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq and destroy its safe haven, warning that the group intends to mount further terror attacks like those that devastated Paris and Beirut last week.

In a unanimously adopted resolution, the 15-member body declared the group’s terrorist attacks abroad “a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security” following the “horrifying terrorist attacks” it perpetrated recently in Sousse (Tunisia), Ankara (Turkey), over Sinai (Egypt) with the downing of a Russian plane, and in Beirut and Paris.

It warned that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Da’esh as it is also known, “has the capability and intention to carry out” further strikes and called upon “Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law” on its territory.

Condemning “in the strongest terms” ISIL and other terrorist groups in the region such Al-Nusrah Front, the Council Member States “to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Iraq and Syria.”

It called on Member States to intensify efforts to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters to Iraq and Syria and to prevent and suppress the financing of terrorism, and reaffirmed that those responsible for terrorist acts, violations of international humanitarian law or violations or abuses of human rights must be held accountable.

It cited “the continued gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of humanitarian law, as well as barbaric acts of destruction and looting of cultural heritage” carried out by ISIL.

The resolution also expressed deepest condolences to the victims of the terrorist attacks and their families and to the people and Governments of Tunisia, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon and France, and to all Governments whose citizens were targeted in these attacks and all other victims of terrorism.

“By its violent extremist ideology, its terrorist acts, its continued gross systematic and widespread attacks directed against civilians, abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law, including those driven on religious or ethnic ground, its eradication of cultural heritage and trafficking of cultural property,” ISIL constitutes “a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security,” the Council stressed.

It also cited the group’s its control natural resources in Iraq and Syria and its “recruitment and training of foreign terrorist fighters whose threat affects all regions and Member States, even those far from conflict zones.”