MOSCOW, September 4 (RIA Novosti) – When US Secretary of State John Kerry said during a debate in Congress that there was no al-Qaida in Syria, he was lying, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.
Al-Qaida is one of the main forces supporting the Syrian opposition, Putin said in televised comments at a meeting of Russia’s presidential human rights council.
“I watched the debates in Congress. A congressman asks Mr. Kerry: ‘Is al-Qaida there?’ He says: ‘No, we are telling you responsibly that they are not,’” Putin said.
The Syrian rebels’ “main combat unit is the so-called Al-Nusra, an al-Qaida unit. They [the US] are aware of that. … He [Kerry] lied. And he knows that he lied. This is sad,” Putin said.
The president added that it was beyond the authority of the US Congress to sanction a military strike on Syria.
“What are they sanctioning? They’re sanctioning aggression, because anything outside the UN Security Council framework is aggression, except for self-defense. But, as we know, Syria is not attacking the US, so this isn’t about defense,” Putin said. “This is inadmissible in principle.”
Putin pointed out that the United States expected that the Syrian rebels would defeat the pro-government troops and US military intervention on the ground would not be needed. But, he said, the Syrian government just a short time ago appeared likely to win the war.
“Why do they [the US] say that not a single US soldier will appear in Syria? Because they think this is unnecessary, that those militants will cope on their own. What they need is support by means and equipment they don’t have – planes, missile equipment. This should be given to them. Well, they’ll get it, right now,” he said.
The Russian president also questioned the reliability of US evidence of the Syrian regime’s alleged involvement in conducting a chemical weapons attack late last month that killed civilians. Putin said it was absurd to assume that the Syrian government would have decided to use such weapons at a point when it was about to defeat its opponents.
The United States has said it is confident that an August 21 chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs was carried out by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and US President Barack Obama is lobbying US lawmakers to support punitive military action against Syrian state targets in response.
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