THEchemical attack carried out last week in Syria, in Idlib, and of which the international community accuses the Damascus regime "it was 100% built”, also because the Syrian armed forces no longer possess chemical weapons. The Syrian president said so Bashar al Assad in an interview with the France Presse agency, specifying that the US attack at the base from which the aircraft are suspected to have departed for the alleged chemical bombing "did not reduce" the firepower of government forces.
However, an official note from CNN claims that the US military and intelligence have intercepted communications of Syrian military and experts about preparing for attack with chemical weapons. The interceptions would be part of the intelligence material viewed in the hours following the same attack in order to establish responsibility. These data do not reveal any Russian involvement in the operations, but the CNN source specified that Moscow's agents are generally much more careful (and capable) than the Syrians in avoiding interceptions.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government agency Sana says that "hundreds of people, including civilians", were killed in eastern Syria in a raid carried out by the US-led anti-ISIS coalition against an "Islamic State chemical weapons depot" in the region of Dayr az Zor.
"Many people suffocated to death from inhaling toxic gases," says the Sana agency. The raid took place yesterday between 17.30 and 17.50, the agency said, underlining that according to the note from the General Staff of the Syrian armed forces, "the depot of poisonous substances" hit was in Hatla, east of Dayr az Zor, in the homonymous region bordering Iraq. There is no independent confirmation of the news.
The US military have instead confirmed that, following an air raid in northern Syria, 18 allied fighters engaged in the fight against Isis were killed by mistake. According to the US Central Command, last Tuesday US planes trusted the incorrect coordinates given to them by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), made up mainly of Kurdish militiamen. The target was an ISIS position south of Tabqa, a stronghold of the Islamic State: the bombs instead ended up on the SDF lines, causing 18 victims.
