GOLAN HEIGHTS: Near an abandoned United Nations observation point whose wall had been riddled with bullets, Syrian and Russian policemen gazed across the Golan Heights near the Israeli border.
The faded UN logo on the hut’s rusty roof was barely visible in Tal Krum, just inside the buffer zone that separates war-torn Syria to the east, from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to the west.
His back to the hilly Israeli side, the Russian army’s Lieutenant-General Sergei Kuralenko on Tuesday told reporters on an organised press tour how “stability” had returned to the buffer zone.
Apart from “a few problems with the IS” group in its southern tip, the demilitarised zone was “entirely under control of Syrian military police”, Kuralenko said.
“Everything is ready” for the return of UN troops, he said, after the peacekeepers were forced to withdraw in 2014.
With help from its Russian ally, President Bashar al Assad’s government has expelled rebels and militants from large parts of the country’s south since June.
After retaking most of the two southern provinces adjacent to the buffer zone, Syrian forces last month raised their flag inside, above the key border crossing of Quneitra.
The Russian military police have set up four observation points along the demarcation line on the Syrian side of the buffer zone, Kuralenko said, and plan to set up four more in the
near future.
They are “willing to hand them over to the UN if it says it is ready to ensure the monitoring of the Golan alone”, he said.
Israel seized 1,200 square km of the Golan from Syria in the 1967 “Six-Day War” and later annexed it in a move never recognised internationally. In 1974, a UN peacekeeping mission was created to monitor the ceasefire line separating Israelis from Syrians.
But in 2014, the United Nations Disengagement Observation Force was forced to withdraw after Syrian rebels and militants overran it, briefly kidnapping more than 40 Fijian UNDOF troops.
UNDOF resumed its activities on the Syrian side in February, and earlier this month
carried out its first patrol since 2014 to the Quneitra crossing. “There should be no military forces in the area of separation other than those of UNDOF,” according to a UN Security Council resolution in June.
With that in mind, Russia is demining the areas around the observation posts abandoned in 2014 to help establish secure patrolling routes for the UN troops, Kuralenko said.
“Our mission here is to ensure security so that the UN flag can fly above their posts and that (UNDOF) work without restriction in the zone,” he said.
A UN spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
But on Tuesday, Syrian Defence Minister Ali Abdullah Ayub received a UN delegation including UNDOF chief Francis Vib-Sanziri in Damascus, Syrian state news agency Sana said.
They spoke of redeploying UN forces on the Syrian side, it said.
During the media tour Brigadier-General Muhammad Ahmad, from Syria’s military police, accused the peacekeepers of fleeing when they were needed in 2014 but said they were welcome to return.
In Hamidiyeh, less than a kilometre from the demarcation line with Israel, buildings lay in ruins and the white dome of its mosque appeared battered by bombardment. — AFP
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