Syrian state media issued a statement this evening in response to US attacks, condemning American aggression and claiming unspecified “losses” as scores of US missiles were fired at an air base in the Homs Province. Officials said they believed the US strikes were meant to “support the terrorists on the ground.”
US officials are presenting the attacks as “reprisals” for an alleged gas attack by Syrian forces earlier in the week. The Syrian government has insisted that they did not carry out any sort of chemical attack, but that their conventional strike hit an al-Qaeda arms depot which it turns out contained chemicals, causing a leak.
Russian officials have offered a similar assessment of the incident. US, British, and French officials all issued statements insisting immediately that Syria had carried out chemical attacks, and have sought to look past a potential investigation into the matter, calling for immediate reprisals, which the US ultimately carried out well before any investigation could happen.
Syrian and Russian officials aren’t the only ones to make such an assessment either, with former CIA officer Philip Giraldi giving an interview today also saying he doubted the US narrative, and that a lot of figures in the US intelligence community are awfully nervous about the US pushing their line as unquestioned fact, absent serious evidence.
This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com.