US Desperately Preventing International Expert Visits to Syrian Sha’irat Airbase
MOSCOW— The United States is desperately preventing international expert visits to the Syrian Ash Sha’irat airbase that it had attacked with cruise missiles in April after it blamed the Syrian government for an alleged chemical weapon attack on April 4 in Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Nonproliferation Department Chief Mikhail Uliyanov told Sputnik.
The United States’ claim that a Syrian military aircraft dropped a sarin bomb near Khan Sheikhoun in April raises serious doubts, Uliyanov said.
Reacting to the incident, Washington, which had not presented any proof of the chemical weapons use by Damascus, launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on the Syrian governmental military airfield in Ash Sha’irat on April 6.
Damascus has repeatedly denied any involvement in the incident and said that the Syrian government doesn’t possess chemical weapons as the full destruction of Damascus’ chemical weapons stockpile had been confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in January 2016.
“The US version regarding an aerial bomb being dropped from a Syrian air force plane raises serious doubts,” Mikhail Uliyanov told Sputnik.
He pointed to footage filmed by the “opposition” at the site of the April 4 incident in Idlib province as proof that the attack may have been staged.
“Such a high degree of readiness to respond, and not in a metropolis but in a small provincial town with a population of 40,000, suggests that the ‘rescuers’ were on the scene before it happened,” Uliyanov said.
The United States is desperately preventing international expert visits to the Syrian airbase that it had attacked with cruise missiles in April, he added.
Mikhail Uliyanov said that “elementary logic suggests that Washington should have insisted on an urgent visit to Sha’irat by the UN and OPCW specialists in order to [incriminate Damascus on an international level of violating the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons”
“But no, the United States desperately prevents international personnel from visiting the air base despite the Syrian government’s invitation and its willingness to guarantee the safety of the trip,” he said.
Russia Envoy Points to Absence of ‘White Helmets’ Video in OPCW Report on Alleged Sarin Attack
The fact that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) did not include a video footage by the so-called “White Helmets” into the report on April’s chemical incident in the Syrian province of Idlib suggests that the US decision to carry out a missile strike on a Syrian airbase was based on “insignificant information,” Russia’s Permanent Representative to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin said on Thursday.
The video footage of the “White Helmets” group featured the bodies of children who allegedly fell victims to sarin gas attack.
“As for the video of children dying presumably from the exposure to sarin, the FFM leaders explained that the experts did not even analyze it as they did not consider it to be primary evidence… But excuse me, photos of whom US Permanent Representative [to the United Nations] Nikki Haley was demonstrating at a meeting in New York? Were they not of these children?… On April 6, at an official meeting of the OPCW delegation with the [US] State Department officials, we were told that US President [Donald] Trump got ‘extremely angry’ when he saw the footage of dying children,” Shulgin said at a 85th OPCW executive council meeting.
The Russian envoy said that reportedly it was exactly this footage that made Trump take the decision to strike the Syrian Ash Sha’irat air base.
“But since you say, I mean our opponents, that the video is not a significantly important evidence in the case of the Khan Sheikhoun incident, then, it turns out that the president of the great power took a critically important decision to launch missiles on the basis of just some sort of insignificant information,” Shulgin said.
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