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West misses Syrian airbases

Assad defies NATO after medical centre bombed
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says his country no longer fear NATO after Saturday's failed cruise missile attack by the combined forces of the western powers.
Mr Assad told a visiting delegation of Russian MPs his country was “no longer afraid of NATO” after Syria's 30-year-old Russian-made air defences shot down around around 70 per cent of the incoming missiles, with no hits scored on military bases.
According to the president's point of view, this was aggression and we share this position,” State Duma member Sergei Zheleznyak said, according to Sputnik International. “He has highly appreciated Russian weapons, which showed supremacy over the arms of the aggressors.”
The US, Britain and France claimed they hit a chemical weapons facility in the attack in the small hours of Saturday morning. But the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported the target was the Pharmaceutical and Chemical Industries Research Institute in Barzeh, a northern suburb of Damascus.
An employee of the research centre told CBS correspondent Seth Doane his office had been in one of the destroyed buildings. "The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) visited here and didn't report anything wrong with this place," he said.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said the attack “could drag the region into serious repercussions which threaten its security and stability, and could create an opportunity for terrorism to expand.”
Short-lived pretext
The three Western nuclear powers launched their attack days after OPCW team arrived to examine the site of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, just a few miles west of Barzeh, pre-empting the UN agency's findings.
A White House statement said it had acted merely on the basis of media reports — which in turn were based solely on unverified claims by the so-called White Helmets and the Syrian American Medical Society. Both organisations are funded by the US government through the US Agency for International Development and operate only in terrorist-occupied areas of Syria.
Russian response
On Saturday the Russian armed forces General Staff said Syria's older S-200, S-125 and Buk surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) had shot down 71 of 103 missiles launched, including all 12 missiles targeting the Ad Dumayr air base east of the capital.
“This strike is not a response to an alleged chemical attack, but a reaction to the success of the Syrian armed forces in the liberation of its territory from international terrorism,” the General Staff stressed, coming “exactly on the day, when the OPCW special mission was set to start its work.”
The statement also revealed that Russia had declined to sell Syria its state-of-the-art S-300 SAMs several years ago on “the request of some of our Western partners,” adding: “Taking into account what happened, we consider it possible to return to this issue. And not only with regard to Syria, but with regard to other states.”

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