Assad says the West will suffer for arming terrorists in Syria

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview published Tuesday that Europe would “pay a price” for arming the Syrian rebels. Both Europe and the United States have been doing so since the civil war broke out in the African country more than 2 years ago..

The president rejected false accusations from the White House that the Syrian Army has used chemical weapons in attacks in recent months, killing 150 people.

“The European backyard will become a terrorist nightmare and Europe will end up paying a price for all that,” said Assad while assessing the possibility that the will of Britain and France is imposed on the continent. The President said in the interview published by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that the kind of illegal immigration plans now being approved in Europe and the United States will bring “terrorism”, and with it many of the weapons from Syria and the Middle East to the European countries.

Terrorism “will spread through illegal immigration flows and through those terrorists who return to their countries of origin to receive indoctrination and training,” he said. Damascus says that most of the terrorists on Syrian soil are foreigners from many countries that arrived in Syria with a radical Islamist and jihadist mentality. While in combat, many foreign citizens from Iraq, Britain and the United States have died, for example.

On Thursday, the White House announced that it will arm the rebels, but still has not clarified what material and in what time frame. This is of course a window dressing announcement, since the Americans and Europeans have been sending weapons to Syria via Libya, Jordan and Turkey for a long time. Within the European Union, the attempts of Great Britain and France to do the same has been opposed, at least publicly, by Germany, which urges restraint. Assad acknowledged this in his interview, saying that Berlin’s “logic raises questions about the consequences of arming terrorists.”

In a statement, Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to the White House said on Thursday that its “intelligence services have determined that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including sarin, on multiple occasions against the rebels” causing 150 deaths. Britain, France and Israel also say they have proof of the use of these substances in combat. President al-Assad also criticized these claims.

“Conventional weapons can cause these numbers of deaths, or more, in a single day. The weapons of mass destruction annihilate thousands of people, and therefore they are used to do so. It would be illogical to use chemical weapons to achieve a toll that conventional weapons couldn’t,” he said. Assad also said that if those powers “had gotten a single proof that chemical weapons have been used, they would have proclaimed it to the four winds.”

Back in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, the United States Security Council heard the case of WMDs from Colin Powell, who brought with him a dossie of documents which purportedly proved that Iraq sought and had WMDs in its possession, which turned out to be the trigger to wage war against Saddam Hussein and millions of innocent people. As we now know, the information contained in that dossie was criminally false.

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