UN Secretariat not too active in investigating oil purchases from terrorists - Lavrov

SOCHI, November 26. /TASS/. The United Nations Secretariat is not too active in investigating facts of oil purchases from terrorist organizations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after talks with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem on Wednesday. “We receive information, first of all from Western and regional media, on oil being shipped from terrorists-controlled regions of Syria and Iraq. Unlike some of our partners, we will keep fighting terrorism on the firm basis of international law,” Lavrov said. “That’s why we submitted, back in July, a proposal to the UN Security Council to take the problem under control, establish facts and outline solutions on that basis,” he said. “Unfortunately, for the time being, the UN Secretariat is not too active in establishing facts, so a few days ago, in a regular document adopted by the UN Security Council, we raised the issue again and formulated it in a wording, supported by Security Council members, which calls to put an end to purchases of oil from those territories,” Lavrov said. “We will be waiting for a report by the UN secretary general with facts and proposals of specific measures that might be taken to stop that trade,” he continued. “I hope this opinion laid down in the UN Security Council document will be heard in the European Union, because not long ago the EU suspended its embargo on oil purchases from Libya. Libya also has an oil producing area controlled by terrorist groups,” Russia’s top diplomat concluded. Fighting between Syrian government troops and militants has left over 100,000 people dead and displaced millions since its start in 2011, according to UN statistics. The first two rounds of an international peace conference on Syria, dubbed Geneva-2, organized by Russia and the United States and designed to negotiate a solution to the Syrian crisis, brought no particular progress in January and February 2014. The parties to the Syrian conflict agreed to continue their discussions. Read more