U.S. trying to sabotage Syria talks by accusing al-Assad regime of crimes - Kosachyov
MOSCOW. May 16 (Interfax) - The United States is once again trying to focus attention on the 'al-Assad regime' and is sabotaging the Syria talks by accusing Damascus of mass executions, Russian Federation Council international affairs committee head Konstantin Kosachyov said.
"Now that a qualitatively new stage is pending in the Geneva talks (considering the de-escalation zones agreement), in which the United States takes no part, the Americans seem to be trying to distract attention to the 'al-Assad regime' again and, by doing so, to sabotage the peace process either unwittingly or deliberately," Kosachyov told Interfax on Tuesday.
"The latest U.S. sensational and declassified revelations of the alleged mass executions in Syria and a certain crematorium at the Sednaya prison near Damascus do not look credible, as the associative flow is too obvious," he said.
"First of all, they are evidently trying to present the Syria events as not just a tragedy but a crime against humanity. Secondly, gas used against the civilian population and crematoria directly reference the most horrid events of last century, the only thing that the general public in the United States remembers, as a rule," he said.
The timing of these accusations is also important, he said.
"The chemical horrors the Western newspapers were covering so broadly amazingly coincided with the rounds of the Geneva talks held at the time and, before that, the Astana negotiations and the period when even the West silently agreed that al-Assad actually did not have to be removed from Syria's future," Kosachyov said.
Various sensations is precisely what the opponents of Damascus need to dodge the Geneva and Astana meetings, Kosachyov said. "Yet the United States should understand in this case that it assumes considerable responsibility for the future of the Syria peace process," he said.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said earlier that Russia had to admit that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was responsible for hideous crimes.
The U.S. Department of State released a report on Monday accusing al-Assad of burning bodies of opposition members in a prison crematorium near Damascus.
