UN refugee chief opposes 'safe zones' in Syria

The UN’s top official on refugees pushed back against a proposed initiative that has gained recent traction to create “safe zones” in Syria for refugees, saying the country was “not the right place” for the initiative. “Let’s not waste time planning safe zones that will not be set up because they will not be safe for people to go back,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees.

“Let us concentrate on making peace so that everywhere becomes safe. That should be the investment,” he said. US President Donald Trump has floated safe zones as a substitute for resettling refugees in the US and elsewhere around the globe.

The president explored schemes with Jordanian King Abdallah in a face-to-face meeting in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Jordan is host to some 650,000 Syrian refugees.

Turkey and Lebanon, which both border Syria, are also pushing for safe zones across their borders. The two countries host 3.75 million refugees between them. Grandi cited terrorism and the fragmentation of Syria and its warring parties as obstacles to creating working safe zones in the country.

Damascus has expressed its deep concern over the various proposals, saying they would have to be set up in coordination with the Syrian regime.

Trump plunged the international refugee system into crisis last week when he issued an executive order forbidding refugees to enter the US for 120 days.

Grandi called the executive order a “dangerous weakening” of the established international norms to protect refugees.

He spoke in Beirut a day after returning from a field mission to Syria. He said the war-torn country was “devastated” and likened many urban zones to “ghost cities.”

“These are people that flee from danger, they are not dangerous themselves,” he said of refugees. The six-year-long war has displaced half the country’s population. Grandi criticized the US and Western nations for “not doing enough” to share the burden of resettling Syrian refugees.

“(Lebanon) hosted more than 1 million people in the last three years, why can’t rich countries host even a much smaller number?” he said.

Separately, Airstrikes killed at least 12 radical fighters in Idlib province in northwestern Syria on Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Unidentified warplanes struck positions of the Jund Al-Aqsa group southeast of Idlib city, near the village of Sarmin, the British-based war monitoring group said. It was unclear if those killed were from Jund Al-Aqsa or other radical factions, it said, and they could have been fighters belonging to Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an alliance of radical groups based in Idlib.

A Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham media unit said the US-led coalition hit one of its positions near Sarmin, killing six fighters.

Several radical factions, including Al-Qaeda’s former Syria branch, joined forces last week, calling themselves the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (Liberation of the Levant Committee).