NEW YORK — Seeking to rebut Syria’s political opposition and its outside supporters, the country’s foreign minister told the United Nations that his government was fighting Al Qaeda and that terrorists were responsible for attacks involving chemical weapons.
Representing Syria in the speech segment of the annual General Assembly session, Walid al-Moallem called on the United States to lift sanctions on Syria and scrap what he called “all unilateral coercive measures” on Venezuela, Belarus, Iran, and North Korea.
Moallem also said Syrian refugees should return home so the nation could protect them.
The only positive remarks he made in the speech about the United States were in his endorsement of efforts made to improve the estranged relationship with Iran, the Syrian government’s only regional ally.
International inspectors entrusted with the enormous task of overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles began their mission Monday, flying to Lebanon en route to Syria on Tuesday.
Officials from the Netherlands-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said the team’s first priority will be to help the country scrap its ability to manufacture such arms by a Nov. 1 deadline, the Associated Press reported.
That may include smashing mixing equipment with sledgehammers, blowing up delivery missiles, driving tanks over empty shells, and running machines without lubricant so they seize up and become inoperable.
Most of Moallem’s speech amounted to a point-by-point rejection of the West’s version of the conflict in Syria, which began as a peaceful uprising against President Bashar Assad in March 2011 and has transformed into a sectarian civil war that has left more than 100,000 people dead and millions displaced.
The war has turned the country into a magnet for Sunni jihadists bent on toppling Assad’s ruling Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.
In a reference to a group of Western and Arab countries that support the opposition, Moallem said, “They are the ones supporting terrorism in my country, in contradiction of all United Nations resolutions and all human and moral values.” He said some of these countries did not want to recognize that Al Qaeda and its affiliates are even fighting in Syria.
Moallem ridiculed assertions made by the United States and its allies about the existence of a moderate armed opposition in Syria that has repudiated the jihadists and that advocates an inclusive democracy representing all Syrian groups.
Moallem appeared to refer only obliquely to the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus that left hundreds of people dead, an event that led to intensive diplomacy by Russia and the United States that averted a US-led missile strike on Syrian government targets.
He also beseeched the Syrian families who have fled to neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, many of them confined to refugee camps, to come home.
“I appeal, from this platform, to Syrian citizens to return to their towns and villages where the state guarantees their safe return and their livelihood away from the inhuman conditions they suffer in those camps,” he said.