17 November 2015•Update: 17 November 2015
NEW YORK
Momentum created by international talks in Vienna must be seized in order to end the suffering of Syrians, the UN aid chief said Monday.
Stephen O'Brien told the Security Council that talks in Vienna was "a glimmer of light" that the international community could provide a solution to the conflict.
"We must take advantage of this rare moment of diplomatic opportunity to push for a negotiated political solution and create the conditions for a nationwide cease-fire," said O'Brien.
Foreign ministers from nearly 20 countries agreed Saturday on a target date of Jan. 1 for formal peace talks to start between the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition.
The countries pledged to support a Security Council resolution "to empower a UN-endorsed cease-fire monitoring mission in those parts of the country where monitors would not come under threat of attacks from terrorists," according to a joint statement.
O'Brien said the Syrian civil war had been a "chronicle of missed opportunities" by the international community to bring the suffering to an end.
"More than five years since the unrest in Syria began, parties to the conflict continue to commit unthinkable atrocities on a daily basis, plunging Syria and its citizens deeper into darkness," he said.
The devastating conflict has claimed more than 250,000 lives and made the country the world's single-largest source of refugees and displaced people.
"The fighting has also propelled the world’s largest humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century", O'Brien said, "with some 13.5 million people in Syria in need of some form of humanitarian assistance, including 6 million children, and driven over 4 million people to seek safe refuge outside their home country".
He said an estimated 400,000 Syrians had risked their lives in perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea this year.
"And still they flee -- yesterday, today, and without a political settlement, tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that -- each day, even as winter approaches and I simply predict all through it," he added.
Neighboring Turkey, which shares a 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Syria, is now the largest refugee-hosting country in the world with more than 2 million Syrian refugees on its soil.
