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Military victory in Syria bankrupt logic: UN

Thursday, 18 February 2016 9:58 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 18 February 2016 10:44 PM ]

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ©AFP

The United Nations has warned against involvement by more parties in the Syrian conflict amid calls by Saudi Arabia and Turkey to roll their war machines into the battle-scarred country.

Riyadh has vowed to contribute special forces to a potential ground warfare component in the so-called US-led coalition, which has been pounding Syria since 2014 without success in its proclaimed goal of routing the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group there. Turkey has also been repeatedly insisting on what it calls a need for sending its ground troops into Syria.

In a letter to the UN Security Council, the world body’s Secretary General Ban Ki-moon advised against adherence to the "bankrupt logic of a military victory" and suggested working instead to find a peace settlement.

"The threats to resort to the further use of force risk derailing efforts to find a sustainable political solution and the ability of my special envoy to credibly reconvene the talks," Ban wrote in the letter.

Three rounds of UN-backed negotiations have so far been held in Vienna and New York on the situation in Syria since last October. The latest round of peace talks unraveled in Geneva on February 3 less than a week after they started as a Saudi-backed opposition group refused to attend a meeting with the UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura (seen below).

The envoy is now trying to convene a new round of peace talks on February 25.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. According to a new report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the conflict has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the country’s pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.

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