They said they believe the information proves both Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the Russian government are lying about the April 4 attack that killed dozens.
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“We’re not going into Syria”, Trump said in an interview with Fox Business.
“The reign of the Assad family is coming to an end”, he confidently predicted.
But Tillerson’s claim is one President Barack Obama, too, argued for years, only to see Assad outlast his own term in office.
Russian President Vladimir Putin likened the allegations to false USA claims in of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
His trip follows Monday’s claim by a senior USA official that Washington has concluded Russian Federation knew in advance of Syria’s chemical weapons attack. “We want them to have to make choices”, explains one official.
Even on Syria, the positions appeared to be hardening.
This military action demonstrates that the USA will not passively stand by while President Bashar al-Assad blithely ignores global law and employs chemical weapons he had declared destroyed, he added. It said the outcome of the discussions is important not only for the U.S. Trump says in a Twitter post that he told China’s President Xi Jinping that Beijing would get a better trade deal with Washington if it helped solve the USA problem with North Korea.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has cancelled his own trip to Moscow, which was due this week, and is now calling for fresh sanctions on Russia as long as the Russians maintain their support for President Assad.
The Kremlin has not confirmed if Putin will eventually see Tillerson.
Mr Tillerson and Mr Lavrov are meeting in the Russian capital amid rising tensions over Syria.
Moscow and Washington are trying to figure each other out during the first visit by a senior member of Donald Trump’s administration to Russian Federation.
As Tillerson prepared for hard discussions on Wednesday, the Trump administration leveled its most serious accusations to date against the Syrian and Russian governments, alleging the two had sought to float a series of “false narratives” in the aftermath of last week’s deadly sarin gas attack against Syrian civilians.
“Russia’s allegations fit with a pattern of deflecting blame from the regime and attempting to undermine the credibility of its opponents”, the report read.
The charges of collusion between Damascus and Moscow came in the form of a declassified National Security Council report, which said USA intelligence agencies had evidence that sarin had been used in the attack, and accused Russian Federation of a cover-up in its aftermath. “But it was not a statement that we could enter full-fledged, full-bore into the most complex civil war probably raging on the planet at this time”.
In the aftermath, Russian Federation brokered a deal that saw a United Nations team supervised the handover of Syria’s sarin, a project completed in 2014.
Trump used the same argument in December, when the intelligence community issued its official assessment that Russian Federation interfered with the USA election.
And wielding the stick of potential military action is risky. But even some analysts who believe U.S. leverage was enhanced by last week’s air strikes say it will quickly vanish if all the United States accomplished is to limit Assad to using conventional weapons in Syria’s war.
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Sharyat air base, the location struck by 57 of 59 cruise missiles fired from the US Navy on April 7, was determined to be the location from which Syrian forces launched the chemical attack on civilians, according to Mattis.
