"Disturbed" US Will Hold Syria Accountable For Chemical Weapons Attack, Kerry Says

Saturday, 21 March 2015

"Disturbed" US Will Hold Syria Accountable For Chemical Weapons Attack, Kerry Says

"More sarcasm from Zerohedge concerning Kerry’s latest gaffe on Syria" Ziad Fadel

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/19/2015 12:33 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated that it might be necessary to invade Syria after all, and not only to rid the world of Twitter-savvy, Nutella-loving murderous terrorists, but also to effect a necessary regime change. Here’s what he said:

“Military pressure may be needed to oust Syria's President Bashar al-Assad."

Now, two days after reports surfaced that the Assad government had once again decided to gas women and children and one day after the Syrian military said it did no such thing because it “doesn’t need to,”John Kerry wants you to know that the US will take whatever measures are necessary to hold Assad accountable for what other people say he might have done. Here’s more, from the Secretary of State:

The United States is deeply disturbed by reports that the Assad regime used chlorine as a weapon again, this time on March 16 in an attack on the town of Sarmin. We are looking very closely into this matter and considering next steps. While we cannot yet confirm details, if true, this would be only the latest tragic example of the Assad regime's atrocities against the Syrian people, which the entire international community must condemn.

What is clear is that the Assad regime continues to flout international standards and norms, including, if these latest allegations are verified, the Chemical Weapons Convention. The international community cannot turn a blind eye to such barbarism. As has been well documented, the Assad regime continues to terrorize the people of Syria through indiscriminate airstrikes, barrel bombings, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, murder, and starvation. The Assad regime must be held accountable for such atrocious behavior.

A chemical weapons attack through the use of chlorine would not only be the latest example of the regime’s brutality towards the Syrian people, but also a direct violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2209, which specifically condemned the use of chlorine as a chemical weapon in Syria and made clear such a violation would have consequences. Any and all credible allegations of chemical weapons use, including the use of toxic industrial chemicals, must be investigated, and we continue to support the OPCW Fact Finding Mission in its continuing critical mission.

The Assad regime’s horrifying pattern of using chlorine as a chemical weapon against the Syrian people underscores the importance of investigating this allegation as quickly as possible, holding those who perpetrated such abhorrent acts in violation of international law accountable, and continuing to support the complete elimination chemical weapons in this volatile region.

While there’s no doubt that the use of chemical weapons is horrific, we would once again note that at the end of the day, this may well be about something different:

Actually, the highest priority is not "Daesh" which is a populist distraction aided by some truly Hollywood-grade video editing and YouTube clips, but who controls the ground under Assad's feet: that all important gateway from the middle east into Turkey, and then, Europe. A gateway that is critical to the one nation that has all the natural gas in the world, and no end market to sell it to: Qatar.

Of course, Assad knows all of this: late last year, Assad told French reporters, “let’s be honest: Had Qatar not paid money to those terrorists at that time, and had Turkey not supported them logistically, and had not the West supported them politically, things would have been different. If we in Syria had problems and mistakes before the crisis, which is normal, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the events had internal causes”.

Assad continued, daring to call the staged US spade precisely what it was: he called its air strikes "merely cosmetic" and said that “terrorism cannot be destroyed from the air.” Assad added that “saying that the alliance’s airstrikes are helping us is not true." Which is why Time had to spin an unsourced article to "prove" that there was in fact a connection between the two.