Updated at 10:09 p.m.
Western allies participating in a strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad are not trying to overthrow his regime, British Prime Minister Theresa May said in a Friday night statement.
“This is not about intervening in a civil war,” May said in a bulletin shortly after President Trump’s announcement of an attack on Assad. “It is not about regime change. It is about a limited and targeted strike that does not further escalate tensions in the region and that does everything possible to prevent civilian casualties.”
May, along with President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, framed the western strike instead as an enforcement of international bans on the use of chemical weapons in war. Her statement Friday reflected the broader Western hesitation to make a major military commitment in Syria, but also the widespread fear that the Syrian civil war could initiate a new era of chemical weapons’ usage in war.
“And while this action is specifically about deterring the Syrian regime, it will also send a clear signal to anyone else who believes they can use chemical weapons with impunity,” May said.
Russia, which has provided indispensable military support to Assad since 2015, has accused the United Kingdom of staging the incident to provide a pretext for the assault. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian representative to the United Nations, suggested that the entire report of a chemical weapons attack in Douma is a fiction.
“The residents of Douma know about no such attack,” he insisted at a Security Council meeting earlier Friday,
But Trump’s team blamed Russia for failing to fulfill a 2013 pledge to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles.
“Today’s response is in direct response to Russia’s failure to keep their promise to guarantee the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert tweeted Friday night. “We hope Russia and Iran will join with civilized nations as a force for stability and peace.”
