DAMASCUS // Syria’s president Bashar Al Assad yesterday claimed the three-year war tearing the country apart was turning in the government’s favour.
“This is a turning point in the crisis, both militarily in terms of the army’s achievements in the war against terror, and socially in terms of national reconciliation processes and growing awareness of the truth behind the [attacks] targeting the country,” state television quoted Mr Al Assad as saying.
The president’s statement comes after both sides in Syria’s civil war said on Saturday that a rural village was victim of a poison gas attack, an assault that reportedly injured scores of people amid a continuing international effort to rid the country of chemical weapons.
The US ambassador to the United Nations said yesterday that reports of a poison-gas attack in a village north of Damascus were so far unsubstantiated, adding that the US was trying to establish what really happened before it considered a response. “We are trying to run this down,” said Samantha Power.
What exactly happened on Friday in Kfar Zeita, a rebel-held village in Hama province about 200 kilometres north of Damascus, remains unclear. It took UN weapons inspectors months to say some chemical weapons attacks probably happened last year, including an August attack that killed hundreds and nearly sparked western airstrikes against Assad’s forces.
But online videos posted by rebel activists from Kfar Zeita echoed earlier images that sparked a world outcry, showing pale-faced men, women and children gasping for breath at a field hospital. They suggest an affliction by some kind of poison – and yet another clouded incident where both sides blame each other in a conflict that activists say has killed more than 150,000 people.
The main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, said the poison-gas attack hurt dozens of people, although it did not identify the gas used.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that relies on a network of on-the-ground volunteers, said the gas attack happened during air raids that left heavy smoke over the area. It reported that people suffered from suffocation and breathing problems after the attack, but gave no further details.
State-run Syrian television blamed members of the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front rebel group for the attack, saying they used chlorine gas to kill two people and injure more than 100.
It did not say how it confirmed chlorine was used.
Chlorine, one of the most commonly manufactured chemicals in the US, is used to purify drinking water. But as a gas, it can be deadly, with the German army using it in warfare in the First World War. The Geneva Protocol of 1925, which Syria signed, banned its use in battle.
The TV report also claimed the Al Nusra was preparing for another gas attack against the Wadi Deif area in the northern Idlib province and another area in Hama.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press