WASHINGTON, April 30 (RIA Novosti) – US President Barack Obama said Tuesday that the circumstances surrounding an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria remain murky and that Washington is working with the Syrian opposition to determine the nature of the purported incident.
“What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them,” Obama told a White House news conference.
“And when I am making decisions about America's national security and the potential for taking additional action in response to chemical weapon use, I've got to make sure I've got the facts,” he added.
Obama spoke cautiously and in generalities about a possible US reaction should it be confirmed that the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad deployed chemical weapons against his own people, which Obama has repeatedly said would be a “game changer” in the conflict.
“As early as last year, I asked the Pentagon, our military, our intelligence officials to prepare for me what options might be available and I won't go into the details of what those options might be,” he told reporters.
The White House said in a letter to lawmakers last week that intelligence gathered by the United States, with the help of opposition forces in Syria, shows “with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria.”
Both sides in the two-year-old civil war in Syria have accused each other of using chemical weapons in recent months. Assad’s government has refused to let UN chemical weapons inspectors enter the country.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that any reports of the alleged use of chemical weapons in the conflict must be carefully investigated to avoid a repetition of the “Iraqi scenario.”
Washington and Moscow have been at loggerheads over the Syrian conflict. Russia, which has continued arms deliveries to Damascus that it says are legal with international law, has warned that rebel forces seeking to overthrow Assad are teeming with Islamic extremists.
The United States, meanwhile, says Assad must step down and insists that it is carefully vetting the elements of the Syrian opposition it is supporting with nonlethal aid to ensure it is not empowering extremists.
