Lamamra: “The Syrian State Has Regained Control Over Aleppo”

Minister of state, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Ramtane Lamamra, has said that “what happened in Aleppo is that the Syrian state has now been able to recover its sovereignty and control over the battered city,” as reported by the TV Channel “Echorouk News” in its latest news edition.

In a press statement on the sidelines of the second day’s sessions of the fourth high-level seminar on peace and security in Africa, which resumed its proceedings, Sunday, in Oran (western Algeria), Mr Ramtane Lamamra swept away the comparison of the situation in Aleppo and Algeria, branding it as “sheer  nonsense”.

The declarations from Brussels of a former official of the European Union, described as an “illustrious nobody” namely (Pierre Defraigne) deserves “no attention at all as it is only empty talk”, he pointed out.

 Mr Lamamra underscored that “the stable and peaceful situation in Algeria is far from arousing such a parallel,” as he put it.

With regard to the recently issued US Travel Warning, Mr Ramtane Lamamra said that Algeria was the first country to have strategically triumphed over the terrorism scourge, adding that the United States’ latest travel warning regarding some parts of Algeria was a “routine bureaucratic procedure”.

US Department of State travel warning on Algeria is a “routine bureaucratic procedure consisting of a series of recommendations made by US consular services,” Lamamra told reporters in Oran.

“Algeria is the first country to have strategically triumphed over terrorism,” he stressed, adding that we should not focus on such routine travel warnings.

“There is a statement (travel warning) on Algeria, but there is also a similar one on Paris, in which Americans travelling to France are advised to avoid going to some areas in Paris for having been the theatre of criminal and terrorist attacks”.

“We should not give more importance than it should have to such routine reports released by United States consular services,” Mr Lamamra asserted.

In this connection, he underlined that the country “has definitively turned this dark page of its history to firmly engage in an irreversible democratic process, guaranteeing the stability of the country, the normal and orderly functioning of the institutions of the Republic, the economic development and social justice”.