PRESS RELEASE
Syrian President Assad: The Entire Chemical Weapons Charge ‘Was a False Flag, a Lie’
April 21, 2017 (EIRNS)—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stated that "the attack on Shairat airport was a false flag, was a lie," in an interview with Sputnik published yesterday. Assad said that the physical evidence on the ground is incontrovertible: not only did Syria not launch a chemical weapon attack on Khan Shaykhun, but they did not even inadvertently bomb an ISIS chemical weapons depot on that site, as Russia originally hypothesized. The entire incident was concocted, from top to bottom, to justify a return to a policy of regime change against Syria.
"We formally sent a letter to the United Nations, we asked them in that letter to send a delegation in order to investigate what happened in Khan Shaykhun. Of course till this moment they didn’t send [anyone], because the West and the United States blocked any delegation from coming, because if they come, they will find that all their narratives about what happened in Khan Shaykhun and then the attack on Sha’irat airport was a false flag, was a lie... So, for us, there was no gas attack and no gas depot, it was a false flag play just to justify the attack on the Shairat base. That’s what happened,"
Assad said.
Assad stated that the Syrian army did carry out an air attack in the province of Idlib on April 4, but six hours earlier than the incident reported by western media. And there is zero evidence of chemical weapons in that area, before or after.
"The attack was already prepared, and they didn’t want to listen, they didn’t want to investigate; they only wanted to launch the attack. We believe it was a false flag for one reason and a simple reason: if there was gas leakage or an attack, and you’re talking about 60 dead in that city, how could the city continue its life normally? They didn’t evacuate the city....
"Even if you look at the pictures, you can see that the rescuers—the presumable rescuers—were rescuing people without masks, without gloves, and they were moving freely. How? This is against all the specifications of the sarin gas that they talked about. You can fake this image, it’s very easy. So, you cannot just base your judgment on images and videos, especially made by al-Qaeda."
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Igor Konashenko on April 20 made a similar argument to point to the fraud being perpetrated. "In the past two weeks, not a single OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] representative was seen there," at the site of the supposed attack in Syria.
"Where do these samples come from [that the OPCW claims prove there was a sarin gas attack]? Who of the OPCW members was able to study them so fast, while standard procedures stipulate a complex research which requires time, as we can see in the case of mustard gas use in Aleppo."
Konashenko ironically went after
"the charlatans from the White Helmets organization [who] were hustling and bustling inside sarin clouds with no protective gear on?... Although independent experts do not believe that anyone could have remained unharmed in a sarin gas attack, nevertheless, maybe Mr. Uzumcu [the head of the OPCW] has created his own periodic table of elements, instead of Mendeleev's one,“
Konashenko stated.
