Only a monster does this, US says; Russia says ‘fake news’

US and Russian diplomats exchanged bitter recriminations on Monday in an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, which met to confront a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel stronghold in Syria that killed at least 48 people near Damascus.

The debate flared as the Trump administration weighed a military response to punish Syria’s regime for the attack. President Donald Trump said at the White House that he would make a “major decision” within 24 to 48 hours.

Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, squarely blamed Moscow for Saturday’s gruesome attack because the Russian military has supported Bashar Al Assad’s forces in the country’s grinding civil war. “Russian hands,” Haley said, “are all covered in the blood of Syrian children. The day we prayed would never come has come again,” Haley told the council, a year after a similar chemical weapons attack in Syria. “Only a monster does this.”

She described photographs of victims – slain infants and toddlers in their diapers, lying next to their dead parents, skin bluish, white foam bubbling from their mouths. Unlike last year, she did not display the photographs but her descriptions were graphic.

The council was debating a US-drafted proposal to create an independent panel to investigate the attack in Douma, the last rebel-held town in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta enclave. The council adjourned without taking a vote, however. The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia said the attack in Douma was staged by anti-Al Assad “terrorists,” and that reports about the use of chemical weapons and photographs of the victims were “fake news.”

Meanwhile, Syrian regime forces and their allies are on alert and taking precautionary measures at military bases and posts across the country amid fears of a US strike.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that as of Monday night, troops have been on a 72-hour alert and are fortifying their positions. The Observatory’s chief Rami Abdul Rahman said the alert includes all army positions and bases from the southern province of Sweida all the way to Aleppo province in the north, the Mediterranean coast in the west to Deir Al Zor province in the east, along the Iraqi border.

The Sound and Picture Organisation, an activist collective in Syria, said that Iranian fighters and members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group have evacuated their positions in the Al Bu Kamal area, near Iraq’s border. Also, the top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei yesterday described a strike on a military air base in Syria as “Israel’s crime” and said it would “not remain without response”, the Lebanese Al Mayadeen channel reported.