In a unanimously adopted resolution, the United Nations Security Council has declared war with Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq (ISIS), and has called on all countries that can do so, to take the war on the group and destroy its safe haven.
The vote in the Security Council came barely 24 hours after the text was presented in New York by the French ambassador to the UN, Francois Delattre.
Stunned by the attacks of one week ago in Paris, the French government had correctly calculated that sympathy and a new sense of crisis in the chamber would trump months of dithering and division on the combined issues of ISIS and the Syrian conflict.
The action in New York came as the world watched another terror crisis unfold in Mali where Islamic militants stormed a hotel in the capital, Bamako, briefly taking 170 people hostage, before the hotel was stormed by security forces. Among hostages were citizens of China, France and the United States. At least 24 people were reported dead in the hostage incident.
The pressure was greatest on Russia and China, both veto-wielding permanent members traditionally averse to any resolutions that could be perceived as interference in another country’s affairs. But Russia recently suffered the downing of the Metrojet airliner over Sinai bearing passengers from Egypt to St Petersburg and this week ISIS claimed it had executed a Chinese national.
The resolution, however, does not invoke Chapter VII of the UN charter specifically to authorise the use of outside military force within the borders of a sovereign state. It was nonetheless crafted in a way clearly meant to give countries additional diplomatic and political cover and impetus to target ISIS and eliminate it.
The UN warned that the group intends to mount further terror attacks like those that devastated Paris and Beirut last week.
The 15-member body, in the unanimously adopted resolution, declared the group’s terrorist attacks abroad “a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security” following the “horrifying terrorist attacks” it perpetrated recently in Sousse (Tunisia), Ankara (Turkey), over Sinai (Egypt) with the downing of a Russian plane, and in Beirut and Paris.
It warned that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Da’esh as it is also known, “has the capability and intention to carry out” further strikes and called upon “Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law” on its territory.
Condemning “in the strongest terms” ISIL and other terrorist groups in the region such Al-Nusrah Front, the Council Member States “to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Iraq and Syria.”
It called on Member States to intensify efforts to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters to Iraq and Syria and to prevent and suppress the ficing of terrorism, and reaffirmed that those responsible for terrorist acts, violations of international humanitarian law or violations or abuses of human rights must be held accountable.
The UN resolution cited “the continued gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of humanitarian law, as well as barbaric acts of destruction and looting of cultural heritage” carried out by ISIL.
The resolution also expressed deepest condolences to the victims of the terrorist attacks and their families and to the people and Governments of Tunisia, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon and France, and to all governments whose citizens were targeted in these attacks and all other victims of terrorism.
“By its violent extremist ideology, its terrorist acts, its continued gross systematic and widespread attacks directed against civilians, abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law, including those driven on religious or ethnic ground, its eradication of cultural heritage and trafficking of cultural property,” ISIL constitutes “a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security,” the Council stressed.
It also cited the group’s its control natural resources in Iraq and Syria and its “recruitment and training of foreign terrorist fighters whose threat affects all regions and Member States, even those far from conflict zones.”