A top Syrian diplomat said Turkey can’t be trusted to help with the investigation into the recent chemical weapons attack by President Bashar Assad’s regime, an accusation made alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“The US will not accept an impartial investigation,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said following a meeting in Moscow. “The General Secretariat of the [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] has a mission operating in Turkey and they are collecting samples from Turkey and I confirm to you that Syria will not accept such an investigation because it serves US aggression.”
Russia and Iran have provided Assad with the military support required to keep him in power through a six-year civil war. Lavrov hosted al-Moallem and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif just days after President Trump ordered a strike on the Assad regime and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s ensuing trip to Moscow. The trio used their press conference to amplify previous denials of Assad’s involvement in the chemical weapons attack, directing blame to the West instead.
Al-Moallem’s claim lent detail to a charge that Lavrov made more generally. “There’s growing evidence that this was staged,” Lavrov said.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who was appointed by Trump after serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, reiterated U.S. confidence about Assad’s culpability in his first public remarks as head of the agency.
“We were in relatively short order able to deliver to our president a high-confidence assessment that, in fact, it was the Syrian regime that had launched chemical strikes against its own people in Idlib,” Pompeo said Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It took — I don’t want to say exactly how long, but we were good, and fast … we got it right, and I’m proud of the work that the team did to help the president have the opportunity to make a good decision about what he ought to do, again, in the face of this atrocity that took place.”
