US President Barack Obama speaks next to Vice-President Joe Biden at the Rose Garden of the White House yesterday in Washington.US President Barack Obama said yesterday in a statement at the White House that he would seek congressional approval for military operations against Syria.
He said the US should resort to military action in Syria in response to the chemical weapons attack and Congress will debate and vote on the matter. Congress reconvenes on September 9.
The US said its intelligence reports indicated the Syrian government carried out chemical weapons attacks on August 21 in which 1,429 people died.
The Syrian government denies it was behind the attacks and blames rebels.
Meanwhile, UN inspectors left Syria yesterday with samples from site visits, which will go to laboratories in Europe for testing.
The Syrian government denies it was behind the attacks and blames the rebels
Earlier yesterday, President Obama said the US, which has five cruise-missile-equipped destroyers in the region, was planning a “limited, narrow” military action to punish Assad for an attack that Washington said killed 1,429 people.
“We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale,” Obama said after Washington unveiled an intelligence assessment concluding Assad’s forces were to blame for the attack.
After laying out the case in a televised speech, US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke on Friday to the foreign ministers of European and Gulf allies, as well as the head of the Arab League, a senior State Department official said.
The team of UN experts drove up to Beirut International Airport yesterday after crossing the land border into Lebanon by road earlier in the day. No Western intervention had been expected as long as they were still on the ground in Syria.
The 20-member team, which had arrived in Damascus three days before the August 21 attack to investigate earlier accusations, eventually visited the sites several times, taking blood and tissue samples from victims in rebel-held suburbs of Damascus.
Inspectors also took samples of soil, clothing and rocket fragments. However, their mandate is to determine whether chemicals were used, not who used them.
Washington says it does not need to wait for the inspectors to report, since it is already certain chemical weapons were used and convinced that Assad’s forces were behind the attack.
Should the US decide to go for the military option, it will likely be joined by France, which has strongly backed the use of force to punish Assad.
“The chemical massacre in Damascus cannot and must not go unpunished. Otherwise we’d run the risk of an escalation that would trivialise the use of these arms and put other countries at risk,” French President François Hollande told Friday’s Le Monde newspaper in an interview. Britain also strongly backed action, but was forced to pull out of the coalition after Prime Minister David Cameron unexpectedly lost a vote over it in Parliament on Thursday.
Turkey backs the use of force and Arab states in the region say Assad should be punished, although they have mainly stopped short of explicitly endorsing military strikes against him. Iran, which supports Assad, has warned of wider war.
Kerry said Washington must act to protect itself and its allies, including Syria’s neighbours Turkey, Jordan and Israel, from future use of banned weapons.
“If we choose to live in the world where a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity” it would embolden others, such as Iran, Hizbollah and North Korea, Kerry said.
Syria and its main ally Russia say rebels carried out the attack as a provocation. Moscow has repeatedly used its UN Security Council veto to block forceful action against the Syrian leader and says any attack on Syria would be illegal and only inflame the civil war there.