UNITED NATIONS: The new US envoy to the United Nations on Thursday accused Russia of seeking to stymie efforts to hold the government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad accountable for its use of chemical weapons during its long civil war.
“We all know the Assad regime has repeatedly used chemical weapons. So why hasn’t the Syrian government been held accountable?” the ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told a Security Council meeting via videoconference.
“The answer is sadly simple: the Assad regime has tried to avoid accountability by obstructing independent investigations and undermining the role and work” of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), she said.
“And the regime’s allies, in particular Russia, have also sought to block all efforts to pursue accountability,” added the US diplomat, who was participating in her first Security Council meeting since taking over as President Joe Biden’s envoy.
“Russia has defended the Assad regime despite its chemical weapons attacks, it has attacked the professional work of the OPCW, and it has undermined efforts to hold the Assad regime accountable for its use of chemical weapons and numerous other atrocities.”
Moscow’s UN envoy, Vassily Nebenzia, defended Damascus, saying: “On Russia’s advice, Syria has abided by the OPCW in good faith, and has gotten rid of its chemical weapons arsenal” – a claim greeted with skepticism in the West.
He also mocked Thomas-Greenfield, who holds the council’s rotating presidency for March, for being a bit wordy in what was meant to be a “brief” intervention to start the proceedings.
“We all always try to be brief, but it’s not always possible,” he said before launching into what he called “a brief and useful historical recap on Council deliberations” – seemingly chiding Thomas-Greenfield for being a newbie.
According to the United Nations, which has accused Assad’s regime of carrying out chemical attacks against its own citizens in the past, Damascus has for years not replied to a series of 19 questions about its weapons installations, which could have been used to stock or produce chemical weapons.
OPCW investigators have accused Assad’s regime of sarin gas and chlorine attacks in Syria in 2017.

ISTANBUL: Nine Turkish soldiers were killed and four others wounded when their military helicopter crashed in the southeast of the country on Thursday, the defence ministry said.
Television images from the crash site showed the ground blanketed in snow and visibility hampered by thick clouds in the mountainous region.
Ruling AKP party lawmaker Tolga Agar, who sits of parliament’s defence committee, tweeted that Lieutenant General Osman Erbas was among the dead.
Erbas is officially listed as the head of the Turkish army’s 8th Corps.
The defence ministry did not immediately confirm the senior commander’s death in a statement which said contact with the helicopter was lost in the Bitlis province 30 minutes after it took off.
“Nine heroic soldiers fell as martyrs and four were injured in the accident,” the defence ministry said, adding that the injured were being transported to hospital.
“I pray for Allah’s mercy for our nine martyrs… Our pain is great,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin tweeted.
Turkish media reports said Defence Minister Hulusi Akar and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu were both travelling to the site of the crash.
The defence ministry said the accident involved a Cougar helicopter but provided no details about the model.
The Cougar family of multi-purpose helicopters were developed by France and are now produced by Airbus.
The accident occurred in a region where Turkish forces regularly conduct military operations against outlawed Kurdish militias.
In 2017, a military helicopter crashed in the southeastern Sirnak province near Turkey’s border with Syria and Iraq, killing 13 soldiers.

KHARTOUM: Sudan will begin vaccinating health care workers followed by people aged 45 or older with chronic conditions for free next week after becoming the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to benefit from COVAX facility vaccines.
Sudan received 828,000 doses of the AstraZeneca-produced vaccine on Wednesday at Khartoum airport, a health ministry official said. The delivery follows that of 4.5 metric tons of syringes and disposal boxes through COVAX in late February.
Sudan says it expects to receive the remainder of a total 3.4 million doses through COVAX, a vaccine-sharing program co-led by the World Health Organization, in the second quarter of this year.
It aims to cover 20% of its population of 44 million through COVAX by September, health ministry officials said.
“This is an essential part of our battle against coronavirus,” Health Minister Omer Elnageib said.
Sudan was also in initial discussions to produce the vaccine domestically, Elnageib added.
Sudan is a young country, with only about 4% of its population over the age of 65, according to UN statistics.
It has been suffering from a long economic crisis that has left it unable to import some basic medicines and its health care system suffered from decades of neglect and sanctions under former President Omar Al-Bashir before his overthrow in 2019.
As of March 1, Sudan had officially recorded 28,545 cases of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic one year ago, including 1,895 deaths.

CAIRO: Egypt’s Ahmed Aboul Gheit was reappointed for a second term Wednesday as secretary general of the 22-member Arab League, a diplomatic source said.
The 78-year old, who served as Egyptian foreign minister between 2004 and 2011, was first elected to lead the Cairo-based pan-regional body in 2016.
“Arab foreign ministers unanimously decided to approve Egypt’s request to reappoint Arab League secretary general Ahmed Aboul Gheit for a new five-year term,” the source said.
Since its founding in 1945, the Cairo-based league has chosen an Egyptian diplomat as its chief, apart from 1979 to 1990, when a Tunisian was appointed and the headquarters moved to Tunis, after Egypt signed a peace deal with neighboring Israel.

CAIRO: Yasmina Al-Habbal always wanted to take in an orphan but only did so last year after Egypt’s government eased regulations over who could do so and campaigned to change public attitudes, enabling her to take home baby Ghalya.
Formal adoption — where people permanently adopt a child, give them their surname and make them their legal heir, is not accepted in Islam due to the importance of respecting lineage, and not practiced in Egypt, although people are encouraged to sponsor children or foster them.
Complexities around Islam and adoption prevented some people from fostering and instead people chose to support children who remained in the full-time care of orphanages.
In January 2020 however, Egypt broadened the rules for who can foster a child to include single women over 30 and divorcees, and reduced the minimum level of education required, hoping that by increasing the pool of prospective foster parents it could make fostering more widespread and socially accepted.
A social media campaign “Yala Kafala” (Let’s sponsor a child) encouraging both taking children home and financing them, started by an Egyptian woman, has also helped spark change.
Habbal, 40 and unmarried, had always dreamt of having a daughter and said she faced social pressure when choosing to care for now seven-month-old Ghalya.
“My friends said to me: ‘how will you face society? What are you going to tell people? Are you going to tell Ghalya that she isn’t your child? Are you going to tell everyone else?’.”
Habbal assured her friends she would respond by telling people their prejudiced views were wrong, and she would tell Ghalya it didn’t matter where she came from.
“I’m going to tell Ghalya… ‘what is important is the positive change you’ve made to so many people’s lives’.”
She added she has a seen a change in attitudes to fostering, and her experience is encouraging others to apply.
“In this past year, the number of families who have applied to sponsor orphans shows just how much people have accepted it. People used to be afraid of it, but now, Egypt’s highest religious authority Al-Azhar, civil society organizations and the ministry of social solidarity are all trying to make the idea more widespread,” she said.
Reem Amin, a member of Egypt’s social solidarity ministry’s alternative families committee said its main goal was to remove the need for orphanages by 2025.
“An orphanage’s main goal is as a stopover point before the child moves to a foster home,” she said.
The ministry’s legal adviser Mohamed Omar said around 11,600 families have taken in orphans since January 2020 and another 11,000 orphans needed homes.
In the second half of 2020 as restrictions due to the pandemic began to ease, the ministry received 1000 requests from families wanting to sponsor orphans.
Cairo couple Mohamed Abdallah and his wife had initially failed to conceive a child of their own and decided to take in an orphan instead.
Months later, Abdallah’s wife Merna became pregnant and now they are raising their biological son Soliman and Dawood, their foster child. “I have a dream that they will be an example for a normal society — two brothers who love each other, even though they are not related by blood,” said Abdallah.