MAGADAN, June 24. /TASS/. Syria has not possessed chemical weapons since 2013 and any accusations that the Syrian army is using them are a pretext for an intervention by other countries, Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview with Itogi Nedeli (Weekly Results) program on NTV Television Channel on Sunday.
"We fully eliminated chemical weapons. We haven’t had them in Syria since 2013," Assad said.
"The story with chemical weapons is a pretext for a direct military intervention and attacks on the Syrian army," he stressed.
According to the Syrian leader, these fairy tales about chemical weapons are invented when the terrorists controlled by the West are defeated in some Syrian areas.
"These provocations have nothing to do with reality. This is the result of their own imagination, and that of the media, and something what is invented by their mass media is further disseminated across the world through the Internet and other media. That’s why it is impossible to prevent this provocation. Americans constantly lie and attack immediately," the Syrian president said.
"When there is no respect for international rules, when there are no efficient UN bodies, you may not speak about preventing provocations and the world lives upon the jungle law," he noted.