Syria's President Says Government's Role in Chemical Attack Is '100 Percent Fabrication'

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Syria's military had given up all its chemical weapons in 2013 after an agreement made at the time, and would not have used them anyway, AFP quoted Assad as saying in an interview.

The Kremlin leader also again slammed the U.S. missile strike and angrily rejected accusations that Assad's forces were behind the suspected chemical attack last week on the town of Khan Sheikhun that left 87 civilians dead including children. "They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack".

The attack killed at least 87 people, including many children, and images of the dead and of suffering victims sparked global outrage.

Syria denied any use of chemical weapons and Moscow said the deaths had been the result of a conventional strike hitting a rebel arms depot containing "toxic substances". It wasn't an attack because of what happened in Khan Sheikhoun.

"You have a lot of fake videos now", he said, according to AFP.

"We don't know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhoun", the tyrant said. "Were they dead at all?"

US President Donald Trump's ostensibly dramatic decision to order a missile strike on Syria was not based on his sympathy for victims of last week's suspected gas attack, given his indifference to widespread human rights violations taking place in the US and other nations.

Syrian Deal to Evacuate Tens of Thousands of People Begins
Syrian Red Crescent ambulances carry the sick and wounded from government-held towns to the rebel-held Rashideen, west of Aleppo . The armed opposition fighting for six years to unseat Assad is mostly Sunni Muslim, like most of Syria's population.

Lavrov said Moscow was hoping to understand Washington's "real intentions" during the visit and warned that Moscow considered it "fundamentally important" to prevent more "unlawful" United States strikes in Syria.

"Our firepower, our ability to attack the terrorists hasn't been affected by this strike", he said. Two days later, the United States launched a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airfield where the planes that carried out the attack were based.

Despite hopes of an improvement in Russia-US ties under Trump, the Tillerson-Lavrov talks look set to be dominated by the war of words over Syria - where more than 320,000 people have died in six years of war.

Standing next to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation secretary general Jens Stoltenberg in Washington, Mr Trump also said it was "certainly possible" that Russian Federation was aware of the suspected attack. I didn't think that was a good sign. "They were there. So we'll find out", he said.

Tillerson, visiting Moscow on Wednesday, addressed the issue of the chemical weapons attack but he stopped short of calling it a war crime.

The result: not only no warm up in relations between the two superpowers, but, as Tillerson put it, "a low level of trust between our countries", a relation that "the world's two foremost nuclear powers can not have". "The world's two foremost nuclear powers can not have this kind of relationship", Mr Tillerson said after the meeting. "But we are sure in advance that the west will not agree to it", Muallem said during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

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