The U.S. appeared to rule out plans to seek regime change in Syria as international condemnation grew after an apparent gas attack Tuesday morning that a human rights group said killed at least 58 people, including women and children.
“The U.S. stands with its allies to condemn this intolerable” and “reprehensible” act, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Tuesday. “We view this as an attack on innocent people.” He also suggested the Obama administration missed an opportunity in previous years to push harder for the removal of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“There is not a fundamental option of regime change as there has been in the past,” Spicer said, adding that it would be better for the Syrian people if Assad left office.
The White House comments are the latest signal that the U.S. acknowledges Assad’s ability to remain in power despite a six-year civil war that saw much of his country fall into rebel and terrorist hands before Russia intervened on his behalf in 2015. While then-President Barack Obama said “Assad must go” in 2011, the U.S. and an alliance of rebels it backed never mounted a successful campaign to overthrow him.
Republican Sen. John McCain said Tuesday that the Trump administration’s recent statements that Assad’s fate was up to the Syrian people “only serve to legitimize the action of this war criminal.”
“In case it was not already painfully obvious: The notion that the Syrian people would be able to decide the fate of Assad or the future of their country under these conditions is an absurd fiction,” McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.
Tuesday’s apparent gas attack drew fury from world leaders and prompted the United Nations Security Council to call an emergency session for Wednesday. The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said its on-the-ground sources reported that one neighborhood “was bombed with material believed to be gases which caused suffocation and other symptoms, like intense breathing secretion, iris shrinkage, pail, general spasm, and other symptoms.”
“I’m appalled by the reports that there’s been a chemical weapons attack on a town south of Idlib allegedly by the Syrian regime,” U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said while on a trip to Saudi Arabia. “We cannot allow this suffering to continue.”
The Syrian Observatory said warplanes attacked the area but it didn’t identify them. Russia’s Defense Ministry rejected the claim that its planes attacked a northern Syrian town with chemical weapons, the Associated Press reported. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is investigating the incident, according to a statement on its website.
The attack appeared to be the largest chemical attack in Syria since August 2013, when more than 1,000 people were killed in the Damascus suburbs by the banned toxin sarin. Under threat of U.S. military action, Assad agreed to a U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate his stockpile of chemical weapons.
(c) 2017, Bloomberg ยท Kambiz Foroohar, Justin Sink
