UNITED NATIONS: The head of a UN body established to determine what happened to potentially hundreds of thousands of people missing in Syria said Wednesday it was essential to find a way to work together with a new Syrian commission.
Assistant Secretary-General Karla Quintana said the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, established in 2023, was only able to enter the country in January, a month after the overthrow of President Bashar Assad, whose family had ruled Syria for more than 50 years.
Quintana said the most important challenge now was to coordinate with the Syrian Commission on Missing Persons, established in May by the transitional government.
Before Assad’s ouster, 130,000 people were estimated to be missing in Syria. But the Syrian commission’s head, Mohammed Reda Jalkhi, said in August that estimates ranged from 120,000 to 300,000 and there “could be more.”
The UN institution is investigating “forcible disappearances” by the Assad regime, missing children placed in orphanages by security services, and disappearances by the Daesh group, Quintana said.
“Everyone has someone or knows someone that is missing in Syria,” she told UN reporters.
She is returning to Damascus next week and hopes to sign a memorandum with the Syrian commission.
“I truly believe that in this moment, the question is not if we are going to work together, but how In practice, this is going to look like,” Quintana said. “I am positive that we are going to find a way forward.”
She said her organization has opened several lines of inquiry, has developed data analysis capabilities and is developing a forensic network. She said developing a registry with detailed information on the missing is crucial for all parties.
In addition to meeting Syrian families with missing loved ones, she said the UN institution has been meeting with representatives of countries whose citizens are missing in Syria, including the United States, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon and Poland.
”We don’t want the families or the mothers of the missing to start dying before us being able to find an answer,” Quintana said. ” We need to work as fast as possible.”
UN strives to work with new Syrian government to determine the fate of the missing
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UN strives to work with new Syrian government to determine the fate of the missing
- The UN institution is investigating “forcible disappearances” by the Assad regime, missing children placed in orphanages by security services, and disappearances by the Daesh group
US investigation points to likely US responsibility in Iran school strike, sources say
WASHINGTON: U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children on Saturday but have not yet reached a final conclusion or completed their investigation, two U.S. officials told Reuters.
Reuters was unable to determine more details about the investigation, including what evidence contributed to the tentative assessment, what type of munition was used, who was responsible or why the U.S. might have struck the school.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday acknowledged the U.S. military was investigating the incident.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, did not rule out the possibility that new evidence could emerge that absolves the U.S. of responsibility and points to another responsible party in the incident.
