- published: 21 Jan 2016
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Staffan de Mistura (born 25 January 1947, Stockholm, Sweden) is a long-serving Italian-Swedish diplomat. After a 36 year career in various UN agencies,United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon appointed him as his Special Representative (SRSG) for Iraq on 11 September 2007. He was the successor of SRSG Ashraf Qazi and assumed his responsibilities in the Mission Area on 5 November and in Baghdad on 11 November 2007. In July 2009 de Mistura became the Deputy Executive Director for External Relations of the World Food Programme in Rome. On March 1, 2010 de Mistura assumed the post of the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) in Afghanistan.
De Mistura’s previous UN posts have included that of Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Iraq, Personal Representative of the Secretary-General for Southern Lebanon, and Director of the UN Information Center in Rome. His work has taken him to many of the World's most volatile trouble-spots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia.
The Syrian people (Arabic: الشعب السوري / ALA-LC: al-sha‘ab al-Sūrī) are the inhabitants and citizens of Syria and are, overall an indigenous Eastern Mediterranean people. While modern-day Syrians are commonly described as Arabs by virtue of their modern-day language and bonds to Arab culture and history, they are, in fact, largely a blend of the various Aramaic speaking groups indigenous to the region who were Arabized when Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula arrived and settled following the Arab expansion. Syrians are tied together by geography, linguistic heritage, religion, and similar Eastern Mediterranean ethnicities. Most Syrians reside primarily in Syria; however 17 million Syrians live outside of Syria and they stay connected to their cultural roots by watching Syrian satellite television, listening to Syrian music and preparing Syrian cuisine.
Damascus, the capital of Syria, is one of the most continuously inhabited cities in the world (for 8000 years straight, Syrians inhabited Damascus), and a large percentage of Damascenes are the descendents of the early inhabitants of Damascus.