Syrian leader calls chemical attack ‘100 percent fabrication’
Assad says claim was used as pretext for US missile strike
Syrian President Bashar Assad says an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed at least 86 people last week was a “fabrication” to justify a U.S. military strike.
Assad said his army “gave up” all chemical weapons and that the attack was “100 percent fabrication” in an interview Wednesday with Agence France-Presse. However, the U.S. military said it intercepted communications between Syrian military officers and chemical experts discussing preparations for the attack, CNN reported Thursday.
“Definitely, 100percent for us, it’s fabrication,” Assad said, according to AFP. “Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-inglove with the terrorists. They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack.”
The U.S. and other nations accuse Assad’s regime of using chemical weapons April 4 in an attack on a rebel-held town in Idlib province. President Donald Trump retaliated by ordering an airstrike on a Syrian air base the U.S. believes was the source of the attack. Turkish officials said evidence points to the use of sarin nerve gas in the attack.
U.S. intelligence intercepts before the attack captured military and chemical experts talking about preparations for the sarin gas attack in Idlib last week, CNN reported Thursday, citing an unnamed U.S. official. The conversations were discovered after the military ordered a review of intercepted information to figure out what happened following the incident, the official told CNN.
The Syrian government was supposed to have had its chemical weapons destroyed in 2014. After Assad crossed then-President Barack Obama’s “red line” and used chemical weapons in East Ghoutha, killing more than 1,000 people, Russia and the Obama administration reached a deal with Syria to round up all of its chemical weapons stockpiles, ship them to a barge and destroy them.
The agreement was intended to stave off a U.S. military strike. But it depended on Syria’s cooperation in identifying and declaring all its chemical weapon stockpiles.
On July 8, 2014, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki made a point of saying that Syria’s “declared” chemical weapons stockpiles “100percent have been removed.” And in January 2015, the U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons announced the destruction “of all chemical weapons declared by the Syrian Arab Republic.”
Israeli officials, however, warned that Syria’s military retained a small portion of its chemical weapons stockpile, according to Haaretz newspaper.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in Moscow Wednesday the U.S. is confident Syrian government forces were behind last week’s attack.
“The perspective from the United States, supported by the facts that we have, are conclusive that the recent chemical weapons attack carried out in Syria was planned and it was directed and executed by Syrian regime forces, and we’re quite confident of that,” Tillerson said.
As for Russia’s role, “we have no firm information to indicate that there was any involvement,” he said.
Trump said it’s “certainly possible” that Russia had advance knowledge of the use of chemical weapons by its ally, Assad’s regime. “I like to think they didn’t know. But they could have,” he said Wednesday.
Russia has suggested the attack may have been the work of rebels or that Syrian planes hit hidden caches of chemical weapons controlled by them.