WASHINGTON:
Destroying Syria’s chemical weapons will take one year and cost about 1 billion
dollars, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview broadcast on
U.S. television on Thursday.
It will
be a very complicated operation, Assad told Fox News, adding that his country
would completely comply with the international convention on chemical weapons.
He also said he would agree to let the weapons be hauled to the United States
for destruction if the U.S. were prepared to pay the cost.
Washington
and Moscow at the weekend reached an agreement on Syria’s chemical weapons,
giving al-Assad’s regime a week to provide full details about its stockpiles
and until mid-2014 to dismantle this arsenal. In the
interview Assad again denied responsibility for last month’s chemical
weapons attack that killed more than 1,000 people.
The
attack was a violation of international law, he said. “That’s self-evident.
This is despicable. It’s a crime.” The interview followed a United Nations
statement on Wednesday saying its findings on the use of chemical weapons in
Syria were “indisputable.” The findings “speak for themselves and this was a
thoroughly objective report on that specific incident,” said U.N. spokesman
Martin Nesirky. U.N.
inspectors were due to head back to Syria “within one or two weeks” to continue
investigations into the earlier alleged chemical weapons attacks, head of the
U.N. team Ake Sellstrom said. A senior
Russian official said on Wednesday that Syria had handed over new evidence
showing that rebels had used chemical weapons in a deadly attack near Damascus
last month.
Deputy
Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said details provided by the Syrian government
would bolster claims supported by Moscow that Assad was not responsible for the
August 21 attack, which the United States says killed more than 1,400 people. “We
believe that this will strengthen evidence that the rebels were involved in
using chemical weapons,” he said in comments carried by Russia’s Itar Tass state
news agency.
Ryabkov,
whose country is a major ally of Syria, also accused the United Nations of
producing a biased report on the attack. “To put
it mildly, we are disappointed by the approach of the UN Secretariat and the UN
inspectors, who compiled their report selectively and incompletely,” Ryabkov
told the RIA Novosti news agency. He argued
that the U.N. report was “politicized and one-sided” as long as it was based
solely on the August 21 attack and did not include findings about three other
alleged chemical attacks.
Ryabkov
met Assad in Damascus where the latter praised Moscow’s position on the Syrian
crisis, according to the state news agency SANA
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