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Russia supplies Assad with MiG fighters

September 22, 2015 at 9:26 am

Russia will supply the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad with 12 MiG-29-M/M2 fighter jets until 2017, media reports have claimed. According to Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, the government in Moscow will ensure that nine of the aircraft are ready by 2016. Unnamed sources said that some Yak fighters are ready for delivery.

Meanwhile, UN human rights investigators said yesterday that countries which supply weapons to the conflicting parties in Syria are responsible for the serious rights violations committed in the conflict.

“A nation has collapsed into the world’s most chaotic and lethal battlefield,” said the head of the International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro. “This war remains deadlocked as violence rips through the social fabric of Syrian society… This disintegration, this rending of a nation, is the price of doing nothing made manifest.”

Pinheiro said that the Syrian tragedy has now reached European shores, which is the spiralling cost of the failure to bring Syria back to peace.

“Far worse, however, is the supply of money, weapons and training bestowed upon belligerents in Syria,” he added. “States supplying arms have legal, as well as moral, obligations. Responsibility for crimes rests with the people who hold the weapons, and those who aid and abet by putting the weapons in their hands, be they state or non-state actors.”

Russia delayed supplying Syria with 12 MiGs and 36 Yak130s in August 2013 because of payment difficulties.