According to Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky, Moscow is circulating a UN Security Council draft statement condemning Israel’s strike on the terrorist headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Damascus last Monday, TASS reported (also read: Assassination-Stunned Iranians Send Furious Message to Biden: ‘America Must Be Held Responsible’).
Possibly in an attempt to solicit Beijing’s support, Polyansky noted that “the Security Council last discussed a similar incident 25 years ago, when a NATO strike destroyed the Chinese embassy building in Belgrade.”
We looked it up on Wiki, so you won’t have to, and discovered that in October 1999, five months after the bombing, The Observer of London and the Politiken of Copenhagen published the testimonies of anonymous sources claiming the bombing had been deliberate since the Chinese Embassy was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
The US and the UK denied the report, but the Chinese continue to believe it.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Tuesday updated the casualty figures from the Damascus attack, reporting that “The number of people killed under the Israeli strikes on the building of the Iranian Embassy has risen to 11 – Eight Iranian people including seven commanders, a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and three members, one of whom is Lebanese and two are Syrians.”
The most important casualty was General Mohamad Reza Zahedi, 65, head of the Quds force, who managed Iran’s arms supplies to militias in Syria and Lebanon, most notably Hezbollah.
“As a result of discussions and based on an agreement with our Iranian and Syrian colleagues, we circulated a Security Council draft statement to the media, which condemns what happened,” Polyansky posted on Telegram on Tuesday. “This is another opportunity to test the real intentions of our Western colleagues. We’ll see how work on the document goes.”
And this, the part about testing the real intentions of Israel’s allies in the West, should get interesting.
The NY Times reported that during an urgent meeting of the UNSC held on Tuesday, the prevailing sentiment among diplomats was condemnation of Israel. They asserted that Israel’s bombing of an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria constituted a breach of international laws and contravened the UN charter safeguarding diplomatic premises.
Never mind that the attack did not touch the Iranian embassy, but instead, with the surgical skills we have learned to expect from IAF pilots, took out the adjacent IRGC command building. The Iranians themselves issued a statement saying the ambassador and his family were unharmed in the attack.
The United States, France, and Britain refrained from condemning Israel, yet they aligned with other nations in emphasizing the principle that diplomatic facilities should be respected during times of conflict. They reiterated concerns that Monday’s airstrike in Damascus, the capital of Syria, posed a significant risk of escalating instability in the already volatile Middle East region.
Or the other way around, fewer Iranian terror experts, a less volatile Middle East?
The Russian diplomat was disappointed that “the UN Secretariat failed to either condemn or make a direct assessment” and condemn Israel’s actions. He added: “The Western ‘trio’ was talking about anything but the airstrike on the diplomatic facility,” and stressed that “if the situation continues to escalate, the US, the United Kingdom, and France would be to blame as they could not bring themselves to condemn Israel’s attack.”
Spoken by the representative of Russia, which for more than two years has been bombing thousands of innocent civilians in the towns and villages of its next-door neighbor Ukraine.
