The White House has refused to clarify if Donald Trump’s belligerent tweets signal a planned strike on Syria, but insisted that Moscow is responsible for last week’s alleged chemical attack, as it failed to rein in Bashar Assad.
Asked to respond to Moscow’s claims that the “civil defense” group White Helmets, which has links to Syrian rebels, were behind the April 7 incident, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the media during an emergency briefing that “the intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture, and the President holds Syria and Russia responsible.”
When confronted about US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ statement that the US was still “assessing intelligence” about the specifics of what happened in the Islamist-controlled suburb of Damascus, Huckabee Sanders answered that she “can’t get into the details,” but that the administration was “confident” that the attack was ordered by advancing government forces.
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Huckabee Sanders went on to explain that even if it did not directly take part in what happened in Douma, Russia bears some of the blame for the attack, as it blocked six Western-backed resolutions on Syria, which supposedly failed to clear the country of chemical weapons following the 2013 Ghouta attack. More generally, she added that Russia has been a “bad actor” for the duration of the seven-year conflict.
The press secretary nonetheless refused to say if the US president’s Wednesday statement that Russia should “get ready” for “nice and new and ‘smart'” American missiles to strike Syria mean that the US is about to use force.
“We have a number of options and all of those options are still on the table – final decisions haven’t been made yet on that front,” Huckabee Sanders said in answer to half a dozen differently-worded questions, adding, at one point, that “no timetable” has been set for any intervention.
