Syria’s president intensified on Thursday a propaganda counterattack against Western accusations that he had ordered a lethal chemical weapons bombing last week on civilians, asserting that videos of victims, including dead and convulsing children, had been faked.
Syria’s president intensified on Thursday a propaganda counterattack against Western accusations that he had ordered a lethal chemical weapons bombing last week on civilians, asserting that videos of victims, including dead and convulsing children, had been faked.
In his first interview since the 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 staged 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 France-Presse in the television interview from Damascus. “Were they dead at all?”
The decision by the increasingly isolated Syrian president to give an interview to a Western news organization appeared to reflect a calculation that his best option, even in the face of incriminating evidence, was to repeatedly deny responsibility for the attack, one of the worst in the six-year-old Syrian war.
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.
The interview with Assad was broadcast as the Syrian government asserted without evidence that U.S. warplanes had bombed what it called a chemical weapons cache possessed by Islamic State group militants in Syria on Wednesday, releasing poisons that it said had killed hundreds.
A report from the official Syrian Arab News Agency showed no visual evidence 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.”
The description appeared intended to corroborate the Syrian government’s claims that all chemical weapons attacks in the war have been carried out by militant extremists.
A spokesman for the U.S. military coalition that operates bombing missions against the Islamic State in Syria denied the report. In a Twitter post, the spokesman, Col. John L. Dorrian of the Air Force, wrote: “Not true! Intentional misinformation…again!”
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