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Assad Said the Chemical Attack in Syria Was a Complete 'Fabrication'

The Syrian president suggested there were "fake videos" of the attack and questioned if children had even died.
Photo by Alexei Druzhinin, RIA-Novosti, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP

Despite the fact that the US is "confident" Bashar al Assad was behind last week's sarin gas attack in Syria, the Syrian president claimed the whole thing was just fabricated from fake videos, AFP reports.

"Definitely, 100 percent for us, it's fabrication," Assad said in his first interview since the April 4 attack. "Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-in-glove with the terrorists. They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack."

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The comments come after a four-page declassified US report accused the Syrian and Russian governments of cooking up "false narratives" about the attack, which killed at least 86 people in the country. Videos believed to have been taken in the aftermath showed the victims, many of whom were children, dead and struggling to breathe. President Trump cited the videos as a partial reason he decided to launch 59 missiles at Syria over the weekend in retaliation.

"You have a lot of fake videos now," Assad told AFP. "We don't know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhun. Were they dead at all?"

According to the European wire service, Assad claimed many times that the country had given up all its chemical weapons in 2013. Syria and Russia have said that the attack did not come from the Assad regime but rather a terrorist chemical weapons stockpile. The US, however, does not believe that terror groups like ISIS have chemical weapons and stated Tuesday that there was satellite video showing the attack was aimed at a civilian area.

"It was very clear that the Assad regime planned it, orchestrated it, and executed it," Secretary of Defense James Mattis said at a news conference Tuesday.

The conflict is weighing particularly heavy in Russia now, where US secretary of state Rex Tillerson recently met with President Vladimir Putin. Russia, which has backed the Syrian regime since 2015, has accused the US of breaking international law with its recent airstrikes and said that ties between the two countries are "completely ruined."