UNITED NATIONS — Armed fighters linked to the Syrian opposition detained 21 U.N. peacekeepers Wednesday in the increasingly volatile zone separating Israeli and Syrian troops on the Golan Heights, a new escalation in the spillover of Syria’s civil war.
The U.N. Security Council demanded their immediate and unconditional release.
The capture comes a week after the announcement that a member of the peacekeeping force is missing. The force, known as UNDOF, was established in 1974 following the 1973 Yom Kippur war to monitor the disengagement of Israeli and Syrian forces and maintain a cease-fire.
Israeli officials have grown increasingly jittery as the Syrian war moves closer to Israel. There have been several instances in which stray fire has landed in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, and Israel is concerned that Syrian weapons could fall into the hands of hostile groups and be used against Israel. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and Syria wants the land returned in exchange for peace.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, the current Security Council president, said talks are under way between U.N. officials from the peacekeeping force and the captors.
U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous, who briefed the council behind closed doors, identified the captors as being from a group associated with the Syrian armed opposition, Churkin said.
“There was no fighting, according to his briefing to us,” Churkin said. “My understanding is that they took over the trucks in which the UNDOF personnel was moving around.”
Churkin said the capture of the peacekeepers “is particularly unacceptable and bizarre” because the UNDOF peacekeepers are unarmed and their mission has nothing to do with Syria’s internal conflict.
“They are there on a completely different mission so there is no reason at all under any circumstances, any kind of sick imagination to try to harm those people,” he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also condemned the capture of the 21 peacekeepers, U.N. deputy spokesman Eduardo del Buey said.
Del Buey said the U.N. observers were on a regular supply mission when they were stopped by approximately 30 armed fighters near an observation post that was damaged in heavy combat last weekend and had been evacuated.
A video posted online by activists showed a group of armed rebels standing around at least three white U.N. vehicles with the words UNDOF on them, allegedly in the village of Jamlah in Daraa province.
The video, circulated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the peacekeepers being held by the rebels are 20 Filipinos.
It accuses the peacekeepers of assisting the Syrian regime to redeploy in an area near the Golan that the fighters had seized a few days ago in battles that left 11 fighters and 19 regime forces dead.
A man identified as Abu Qaed al-Faleh, spokesman for the Martyrs of Yarmouk Brigades, announced the group is holding the peacekeepers until Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces withdraw from Jamlah.
