GENEVA: After 14 years of destruction, Syria must be swiftly rebuilt to bring stability to the country and the wider region, a top UN official in the war-ravaged nation told AFP.
Reconstruction is one of the most significant challenges facing Syria’s new Islamist authorities after the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar Assad last December.
“The international community should definitely rush into rebuilding Syria,” Rawhi Afaghani, the UN Development Programme’s deputy representative in Syria, told AFP this week during a visit to Geneva.
“Being able to help the country to rebound and come out of this war and come out of this destruction is for the Syrians themselves, but also for the stability and the good of the whole region,” he said in the interview.
The Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011 with Assad’s brutal repression of anti-government protests, killed over half a million people and devastated the country’s infrastructure.
