The Sunday Mail
Security Council adopts resolution that aims to weaken group that has seized territory in Iraq and Syria.
The United Nations Security Council has taken a tough line against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, blacklisting six people including the group’s spokesman and threatening sanctions against its financiers and weapons suppliers.
The 15-member council unanimously adopted last Friday a resolution that aims to weaken the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda splinter group that has seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate — and al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing al-Nusra Front.
The Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while al-Nusra Front was added earlier this year.
“We have watched in horror their brutal actions,” said Mark Lyall Grant, UK ambassador to the UN and presiding officer of the UN council meeting. “They are deliberately targeting civilians.”
Both groups are designated under the UN al-Qaeda sanctions regime.
Hours after the resolution was adopted, early yesterday morning, US warplanes carried out more air strikes in northern Iraq, according to the Kurdish news agency Roodaw.
The strikes were on four sites near the Mosul Dam which is controlled by the Islamic State, witnesses said.
Last Friday’s resolution named six people who will be subject to an international travel ban, asset freeze and arms embargo. They include Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, an Iraqi described by UN experts as one of the group’s “most influential emirs” and close to its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The Islamic State’s swift and brutal push to the borders of Iraq’s autonomous ethnic Kurdish region and towards Baghdad has sparked the first US air strikes in Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011.
The Security Council resolution “deplores and condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist acts of ISIL and its violent extremist ideology, and its continued gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law.” — Al Jazeera and agencies
