UN Moves to Rein in ISIL Group
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - The United Nations Security Council took a tough line against the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL) group, blacklisting six people including the group's spokesman and threatening sanctions against its financiers and weapons suppliers.
The 15-member council unanimously adopted on Friday a resolution that aims to weaken the ISIL - an al-Qaeda splinter group that has seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate - and al-Qaeda's Syrian wing al-Nusra Front.
The ISIL group has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while al-Nusra Front was added earlier this year.
"We have watched in horror their brutal actions," said Mark Lyall Grant, UK ambassador to the UN and presiding officer of the UN council meeting. "They are deliberately targeting civlians."
Both groups are designated under the UN al-Qaeda sanctions regime, Al Jazeera reported.
Hours after the resolution was adopted, early Saturday morning, US warplanes carried out more air strikes in northern Iraq, according to the Kurdish news agency Roodaw.
The strikes were on four sites near the Mosul Dam which is controlled by the ISIL, witnesses said.
Friday's resolution named six people who will be subject to an international travel ban, asset freeze and arms embargo. They include ISIL spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, an Iraqi described by UN experts as one of the group's "most influential emirs" and close to its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The ISIL's swift and brutal push to the borders of Iraq's autonomous ethnic Kurdish region and towards Baghdad has sparked the first US air strikes in Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011.
The Security Council resolution "deplores and condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist acts of ISIL and its violent extremist ideology, and its continued gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law."
