Brahimi: I resigned to draw attention to the Syrian crisis

The former Special Envoy to Syria for the Arab League and the UN Lakhdar Brahimi resigned from his position to draw the world’s attention to the Syrian crisis, he said in an interview on CNN yesterday.

Brahimi said: “I resigned because I was getting nowhere and it was the only way for me to protest the total inattention of the international community and the region to the situation in Syria.”

He said that he spoke with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad about a list of more than 29,000 political prisoners adding: “Do you really believe that he doesn’t know about these barrel bombs that are being dropped almost every day by his air force. The cannons, the tanks that are shelling the cities. It’s impossible that he doesn’t know.”

Brahimi described the Syrian crisis as “infected wound”, saying “If you ignore a problem like this, it’s like an infected wound. If you don’t do anything to prevent it from spreading it will spread and it will not only spread inside the country it will spill all over the place.”

The former envoy compared the current Syrian situation to his warnings about the situation in Afghanistan before the September 11 bombings, saying: “This is what I said in September 1999 and nobody was listening. In 2001, I think people understood what I was talking about.”

Brahimi resigned from his post as United Nations Special Envoy to Afghanistan in 1999 during the Taliban rule in the period leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.