Barack Obama today told of America’s “grave concern” at the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria which Britain directly blamed on president Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The US president said the incident was “very troublesome” as Russia joined the West and the United Nations in calling for weapons inspectors to be given access to the area outside Damascus where hundreds of people are believed to have been killed.
But Mr Obama also played down what the US could do to stop the bloodshed in Syria where more than 100,000 have been killed in the civil war which has raged for more than two years.
“What we’ve seen indicates that this is clearly a big event, of grave concern,” Mr Obama said in a television interview with CNN.
“There is no doubt that when you start seeing chemical weapons used on a large scale, and again we are still gathering information about this particular event, it’s very troublesome.”
But he added: “The notion that the US can somehow solve what is a sectarian complex problem inside of Syria sometimes is overstated.”
British Foreign Secretary William Hague stressed the “only possible explanation” for the “terrible atrocity” was a chemical weapons attack.
“There is no other plausible explanation for casualties so intense in such a small area on this scale,” he said.
“We do believe that this is a chemical attack by the Assad regime on a large scale.
“This is not something that a humane or civilised world can ignore. Our priority is to make sure the world knows the facts of what has happened.”
He argued that there was only a “vanishing small” likelihood that Assad’s opponents carried out the attack, believed to be with a nerve agent, as previously suggested by Russia.
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Mr Hague called for UN weapons inspectors, already in Damascus, to be permitted to visit the site within days, warning that “time is of the essence” to discover if chemical weapons were used.
If Assad refuses to allow that, the UN Security Council would have to “speak more forcibly” to ensure this happened, he added.
