“Iran’s efforts to play the victim in 2017 about chemical warfare does not mesh with its track record of supporting Assad in his scorched earth chemical warfare against Syrian civilians”, Weinthal noted.
Advertisement
– Mississippi’s junior USA senator, Roger Wicker, says President Donald Trump acted in accordance with the Constitution when he ordered missile air strikes on a Syrian air base last Thursday-but that hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died from chemical and barrel-bomb attacks in recent years in a conflict he calls “complicated”.
But Assad told AFP that the US alerted Russian Federation either “a few minutes before the launching” or possibly even sometime between the time the missiles were launched and they struck their target.
“India is a signatory to the chemical weapons convention”.
He added that videos showing children dying from the attack were “propaganda” created to prompt the retaliatory United States missile strike days later. “No signs of trauma are visible on their corpses, which is consistent with chemical poisoning”, the Amnesty report stated. “These have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, or a sarin-like substance”, the delegation said during a special session on Syria at the OPCW in The Hague.
The OPCW has blamed Assad’s government for at least two attacks in 2014 and 2015 involving the use of chlorine.
The Syrian civil war has been a humanitarian disaster, with millions displaced and the region destabilized, and the USA response to the chemical attack does
nothing to solve the underlying problems that led to the use of sarin gas in the first place.
Vilified by accusations of using a chemical bomb, Syria’s president intensified his counterpropaganda campaign Thursday, suggesting that child actors had staged death scenes to malign him and that USA warplanes had bombed a terrorist warehouse full of poison gases, killing hundreds of people.
Assad also accused the United States of defending ISIS.
A US-led air strike mistakenly killed 18 members of a Kurdish and Arab militia backed by Washington south of the Syrian city of Tabqa, the Pentagon said today.
US officials said the April 4 chemical weapons attack was carried out by Assad’s forces.
The Syrian government denied the accusation.
“Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-in-glove with the terrorists”, Assad said in an interview with Agence France-Presse.
Speaking in his first interview since the incident, Mr Assad said he gave “no order to make any attack” and claimed “even if we had (chemical weapons) we wouldn’t use them”.
Assad said he would only allow an “impartial” external investigation involving “unbiased countries”, according to AFP.
Russian Federation is set to block a push by Western powers at the United Nations later on Wednesday to bolster support for global inquiries into the April 4 toxic gas attack in Syria.
Assad’s complete denial of any wrongdoing is nothing new.
Advertisement
He insisted several times his forces had turned over all chemical weapons stockpiles in 2013, under a deal brokered by Russian Federation to avoid threatened U.S. military action.
