Syria's domestic opposition hails UN resolution on chemical weapons

A prominent figure of Syria's domestic opposition on Sunday hailed the United Nations Security Council resolution on chemical weapons, saying it prevented a U.S. military strike that could spark broader regional war. The U.N. Security Council resolution would help remove the chemical weapons from the conflict in Syria and thus could save more lives, said Safwan Akkasheh, a prominent figure in the National Coordination Body, a group which advocates peaceful political transition in Syria. This resolution will help decrease the number of Syrian victims and it also spares us a foreign military aggression, and saved the region from a wide-scale regional war, he told Xinhua in an interview. Regarding the UN calls for holding the international conference on Syria in Geneva in mid-November, Akkasheh commented that the international community has been convinced that there is no military solution to the current crisis in Syria. "We think that there is no military solution to the crisis and our destiny is the political solution and the sole gate before the political solution is the Geneva conference... so all political and honorable Syrian parties must head toward this conference and work to make it successful," he added. Amid risks of escalation of Syrian conflicts, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday to adopt a resolution aimed at ridding Syria of chemical weapons, bringing settlement of the 30- month-old Syrian crisis back within U.N. framework. Under the legally binding resolution which is based on a deal between Washington and Moscow, the Syrian government will abandon its chemical weapon stockpile and give experts unfettered access to monitor its destruction by mid-2014, to avoid U.S. military attacks.