Iraq Fears Hasty Response to Idlib Incident to Hamper Peace Process - Ambassador

Baghdad is concerned that hasty actions following the suspected chemical attack in Syria's Idlib will derail the peace settlement, Iraqi Ambassador to Russia Haidar Mansour Hadi told Sputnik Thursday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The incident in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib on April 4 claimed lives of dozens of people. Blaming the attack on Syria's President Bashar Assad, the United States launched a cruise missile attack on the government airfield in Syria's province of Homs overnight April 6, which left at least two civilians from a nearby village and five Syrian servicemen dead according to Homs Governor Talal Barazi.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iraq issued a statement condemning the use of chemical weapons in Syria… We demanded an urgent and impartial international investigation, confirmed that Iraq expressed concern about the swift and hasty actions that can destroy the ongoing process of peace and crisis resolution in Syria conducted by the international community," Hadi said.

The ambassador disagreed that the attack was designed to distract the attention from the mounting civilian casualties in Iraqi Mosul, as "the situation in Iraq is different from the situation in Syria."

On Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry said that the US missile attack on Syria's military airfield was an attempt to divert attention from the situation in Iraq's Mosul.

After a major chemical weapons attack in Syria's East Ghouta in 2013, the country joined the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In January 2016, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced that all chemical weapons in Syria had been destroyed. Assad said that the country’s government had never used weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, against the Syrian people.