Kerry: UN Report Reinforces Stance on Syria
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KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday on Capitol Hill that the United Nations report on the use of chemical weapons in Syria validated the evidence the United States has presented to Congress and the American people.
“Yesterday, the United Nations issued an extraordinarily significant report regarding the gas attacks in Damascus on the 21st of August, and the detail in this report — the types of munitions that were used, the trajectory of the rockets themselves, the type of sarin gas, the types of rockets, the identification markers — all of these details are extraordinarily significant in pointing out that it really was the Assad regime that committed this attack, and this attack happened in the way that we described,” Kerry told reporters outside a classified briefing.
“The report of the United Nations documents that what we said to the American people, what we said to the Congress and to the world, was absolutely true, and our intelligence community deserves enormous respect and gratitude for the capacity that it showed in putting this case fully together as quickly as it did,” he added.
Kerry was on Capitol Hill for a classified briefing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to discuss the agreement reached between the U.S. and Russia.
Kerry’s statement echoed those the administration made when the report was released Monday.
“The findings in the report…do support the conclusion the world already reached based on overwhelming evidence that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.
“It reinforces what we believe was already overwhelming evidence, not only that a chemical weapons attack occurred on a large scale, that sarin nerve agent was used, and that the only group capable of delivering that attack, both in the means that it was delivered through surface- to-surface rockets and using the agent that was use, was the Assad regime,” Carney added.
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