Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad make the comments in an interview with the
Associated Press in the wake of a chemical weapons attack that killed at least 355 people, and as President Barack Obama placed the blame for the attack on the Syrian government.
“There will be no international military intervention,” Mikdad said in
the interview at his office in Damascus. “If individual countries want to pursue aggressive and adventurous policies, the natural answer … would be that Syria, which has been fighting against terrorism for almost three years, will also defend itself against any international attack. Syria will not be an easy target.”
It appeared Monday that some kind of military attack against Syria was imminent, with or without UN Security Council approval as Secretary of State John Kerry used increasingly threatening words in response to the chemical attack, for which the Syrian government, and anti-government forces each blame the other.
"This is about the large scale, indiscriminate use of weapons that the civilized world long ago decided must never be used at all, a conviction shared even by countries that agree on little else,"
Kerry said at the State Department Monday. "There is a clear reason that the world has banned entirely the use of chemical weapons."
"President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who used the world's most heinous weapons against the world's most vulnerable people," Kerry said.
