I am writing to you further to our letters regarding the practices of the Turkish regime and the systematic attacks that it has committed against the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic. Those practices and attacks constitute a clear violation of the principles governing friendly relations and good neighbourliness between States, and a serious violation of the pillars of international law and the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations. In that connection, and on instructions from my country’s Government, I should like to convey to you the following information.

The Erdoğan regime continues to press ahead with its efforts to change the demographic and administrative nature of the areas that it occupies in northern and north-western Syria and to Turkify them. That regime, in cooperation with its terrorist organization proxies, has seized a large area of Syrian territory, raised the Turkish flag over official and service institutions and buildings, appointed a Turkish governor and government officials to oversee it and built a separation wall. Those efforts have also included changing the names of roads and public squares and replacing them with Turkish and Ottoman names. In addition, the Erdoğan regime has Turkified school curriculums and documents and vehicle number plates, introduced Turkish telecommunications and postal companies, connected power transmission networks to the Turkish grid, ordered that trade should be carried out using the Turkish lira instead of the Syrian pound and has prevented the Syrian Arab Red Crescent from engaging in humanitarian work and replaced it with the Turkish Red Crescent.

More recently, the occupying Turkish forces and their terrorist organization proxies have established a civil registry secretariat that is directly affiliated with them, formed local councils in the cities and towns that they control, and invalidated personal identification cards and family cards issued by the Syrian Government, confiscating them and replacing them with Turkish identification cards.

The acts of aggression, occupation, support for extremism and terrorism, murder, displacement, Turkification, the looting of the capabilities, wealth and natural resources of the Syrian people, the use of water as a weapon of war against civilians and other crimes committed by the Erdoğan regime and its occupying forces confirm the expansionist ambitions of the Turkish regime, which dreams of reviving the Ottoman Empire. In that connection, Syria reaffirms that the Erdoğan regime’s Turkification policy, which is aimed at obliterating the Syrian national identity and imposing Turkish identity by force and coercion, will not change the legal status of the territories that it occupies or the Syrian nationality of the people in those territories, nor will it in any way prejudice the legal and sovereign rights of the Syrian Arab Republic.

Syria reiterates that it strongly condemns the Turkish regime’s practices, which require the international community, represented by the United Nations, to take urgent action in order to end them. Syria calls upon the Security Council to fulfil its responsibility to end the occupation and the occupiers’ flagrant violations of international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and Security Council resolutions concerning the situation in my country, in all of which the Council reaffirms that the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic must be respected.

I should be grateful if the present letter could be circulated as a document of the Security Council.

Bassam Sabbagh