Baladi News - Media
Armenia is pressing ahead with plans to deploy military doctors and demining experts in Syria, Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan said on Monday.
Tonoyan told reporters that the Armenian military and other relevant parties are now completing “memorandum-related procedures” required for such a deployment.
“It could be done very quickly,” he said in comments cited by the Armenpress news agency. “It could happen before the end of this year or early next year.”
“The group is fully prepared, it can leave [for Syria] immediately after that process is complete,” he added.
Yerevan’s plans to launch a “humanitarian mission” in Syria were first announced by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian following his September 8 talks in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tonoyan clarified afterwards that the Armenian contingent will include about 100 medics, sappers and other military personnel tasked with protecting them.
According to one of Tonoyan’s deputies, Gabriel Balayan, they will be primarily helping civilians in the war-ravaged city of Aleppo. Balayan told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on September 11 that the deployment will be carried out “at the request of the Syrian government.”
The former Armenian government seemed reluctant to commit troops for such a mission. Speaking at the UN General Assembly in September 2017, then President Serzh Sarkisian said Armenian deployment in Syria requires a UN mandate.
An estimated 80,000 ethnic Armenians lived in Syria and Aleppo in particular before the outbreak of the bloody civil war there in 2011. Most of them have since fled the country. Thousands of Syrian Armenians have taken refuge in Armenia.
Source: Azatutyun