The Secretary General travels to New York for the UN General Assembly Meetings on Palestine, Syria and the First Contact Group Meeting on Yemen

With the escalating Israeli aggressions on Al Quds and Al Aqsa Mosque as well as the ongoing Syrian refugees crisis at the top of his concerns, the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Mr. Iyad Ameen Madani, is traveling tomorrow, Saturday, 26 September 2015, at the head of a high-level delegation to New York to participate in the 70th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, which opens on 28 September 2015. During the UNGA the OIC is preparing to hold an emergency meeting in New York of the foreign ministers of the OIC Member States to discuss the Israeli violations in the occupied city of Al-Quds and ways to stop the Israeli assaults on Al-Aqsa Mosque. Worth noting is that the UN is having a ceremony for raising the flag of the State of Palestine for the first time. On the sidelines of the UNGA, the Annual Coordination Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the OIC Member States under the chairmanship of Kuwait will be held as well. Also, the OIC Contact Groups on Somalia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Jammu and Kashmir, the Rohingya, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yemen will meet to review developments in these areas and evaluate the options ahead. The Yemen Contact Group will meet for the first time since it was established by the Extraordinary Ministerial Meeting on Yemen held at the OIC in June 2015. Moreover, the OIC delegation will be participating in several meetings at the UN among which, meetings on the issue of countering violent extremism, and on the conflict in Syria, especially on the devastating refugees’ crisis. The Secretary General will be meeting with the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General for Syria, Mr. Staffan De Mistura, to discuss the Syria peace talks, and with the President of the Syrian National Coalition, Dr. Khaled Khoja. In addition to his bilateral meetings with foreign ministers of several states, the EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy and the UN Secretary General, Mr. Madani is holding a coordination meeting with the Secretary Generals of the League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council on issues of mutual concern. Furthermore, the OIC will be cosponsoring two events. One with the Global Fund on partnership in the fight against Malaria in OIC Member States, and the second with the UN and the African Union on Somalia. The OIC is also organizing two roundtable events, one on the role of women in peace building and the other with artists and people working in the creative field.