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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