‘Were they dead at all?’: Assad counters accusation
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 U.S. warplanes had bombed a terrorist warehouse full of poison gases, killing hundreds of people.
In his first interview since an April 4 attack on the northern town of Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people, sickened hundreds and outraged the world, President Bashar Assad of Syria not only doubled down on the government’s denials of responsibility, but contended without evidence that the episode had been fabricated as a pretext for a U.S. retaliatory missile strike.
“We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhoun,” Assad told Agence FrancePresse in the television interview from Damascus. “Were they dead at all?”
Medical examiners in Turkey, where many of the Khan Sheikhoun victims were taken, have said that autopsies showed they had been attacked with sarin, a lethal nerve agent and a banned chemical weapon that Syria had claimed to have eradicated. In a further sign that sarin was used, the British delegation to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global group that polices adherence to a treaty banning such munitions, said samples taken from the attack had tested positive for sarin, Reuters reported.
The interview with Assad was broadcast as the Syrian government’s news agency asserted without evidence that U.S. warplanes had bombed what it called a chemical weapons cache possessed by Islamic State militants in Syria on Wednesday, leaving hundreds dead, including “a large number of civilians, due to suffocation caused by the inhalation of toxic materials.”
The news agency’s report showed no visual proof of an attack but said it had taken place in the village of Hatla in Deir el-Zour province, causing a “white cloud that soon turned into yellow as a result of the explosion of a huge depot that includes a large amount of toxic materials.”
An airstrike by BEIRUT — the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State killed 18 Syrian fighters allied with the United States, the military said Thursday.
The strike, on Tuesday in Tabqah, Syria, was the third time in a month that U.S.-led airstrikes may have killed civilians or allies, and it comes even as the Pentagon is investigating two previous airstrikes that killed or wounded scores of civilians in a mosque complex in Syria and in a building in the west of Mosul, Iraq.
Tuesday’s strike was requested by coalition allies who were on the ground near Tabqah, the U.S. Central Command, which oversees combat operations in the Middle East, said in a statement. The fighters had called in the airstrikes and “identified the target location as an ISIS fighting position,” it said, using another name for the Islamic State.
The Central Command statement said that the target location turned out to be a “fighting position” for the Syrian Democratic Forces, who have been fighting the Islamic State alongside the United States.
It was unclear whether the strike came from a U.S. warplane or from one of the other coalition partners.
“The coalition’s deepest condolences go out to the members of the SDF and their families,” Central Command said in the statement, calling the episode “tragic.” Military officials said the cause is being investigated.
The SDF acknowledged the strike, saying a number of its fighters were killed and wounded.
On Thursday, the group held funerals for 17 of its fighters in the border town of Tal al-Abyad, the SDFlinked Hawar news agency said, though it did not say whether they were killed in the friendly fire incident.
An activist-run group, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, said three days of mourning had been declared for the town. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 25 SDF fighters were killed in the last two days of battle.
As the U.S.-led military campaigns against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have intensified in recent months, so, too, have reports of civilian casualties and, now, friendly fire.
Military officials say that is to be expected as Iraqi forces try to retake Mosul in what is seen as the last big urban hurdle to defeating the extremist Sunni militant group in Iraq, and while forces allied with the United States are moving in on the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, in Syria.
President Donald Trump has indicated that unlike President Barack Obama, who had his White House scrutinize many military operations, he will leave more operational decision-making to the Pentagon and to U.S. commanders in the field.
That move has been welcomed by many in the military, who often expressed frustration at what they saw as a cumbersome decision-making process in Obama’s White House. But it has raised questions about whether Trump is exercising sufficient oversight.
The SDF, meanwhile, announced the launch of a new phase of its campaign to retake Raqqa. The Kurdish fighters, with U.S.-led air and ground support, have surrounded Tabqa, some 425 miles southwest of the city and are working to clear Islamic State militants out of Jalab Valley, north of Raqqa.