DAMASCUS (Sputnik) — The United States' activities in Syria undermine the new administration's reputation, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad told Sputnik on Monday.
"We believe that such attacks undermine the reputation of the US inside and outside the US," Mekdad said.
He stressed that US President Donald Trump "is now contradicting his all campaign promises, and this demonstrates the dishonesty of US leaders."
The deputy foreign minister noted that the continuation of such a policy by the Trump administration in the coming years can "bring back the atmosphere of the Cold War" or the times of US invasions to Vietnam and Iraq.
On April 7, the United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Syrian military airfield in Ash Sha’irat. US President Donald Trump said that the attack was a response to the alleged chemical weapon use in Syria's Idlib province on April 4, which resulted in the death of over 80 people, an incident which Washington blames on the Syrian government.
"This aggression is support to terrorist groups or all those who seek the failure of efforts that are being made efforts by the UN or our Russian friends in Astana or Geneva," Mekdad said. "I can confirm that Syria, with the support of our Russian friends, will be able to find ways to defend itself against these missiles or repeated attempts at aggression," he added.
According to Mekdad, the Daesh and Jabhat Fatah al Sham (formerly known as al-Nusra Front) terrorist groups, both outlawed in Russia, have been the most overjoyed with the recent US missile strike on the Syrian Ash Sha’irat military airfield.
"I consider that the US goal was to defend terrorist groups, because Daesh and al-Nusra Front were the most overjoyed with this US aggression, though, US President [Donald Trump] earlier promised to fight against Daesh," the deputy foreign minister added.
The Syrian foreign minister denied the government’s involvement in the Idlib incident, saying it had never nor would it ever use chemical weapons on either civilians or terrorists operating in the country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on April 6 that groundless accusations in the chemical weapons incident in Syria's Idlib were unacceptable before the investigation into the matter had been carried out while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday criticized the US missile attack as a violation of the international law.
After the missile attack, the Russian Defense Ministry suspended a point-to-point communications link with the US military under the memorandum of understanding on de-confliction in Syria.
Earlier this year, Assad said that the country’s government had never used weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, against the Syrian people. Besides, under a Russian-US deal after the east Ghouta sarin gas incident in 2013, Damascus joined the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and agreed to destroy its stockpile under Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) oversight. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that all chemical weapons in Syria had been destroyed.
