President Barack Obama used his nationally televised address to the American people on Tuesday to detail what happened in the days surrounding Aug. 21, when the U.S. government says the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime unleashed a brutal chemical weapons attack against its own people.
“In the days leading up to august 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas,” Obama said. “They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces. Shortly after those rockets landed, the gas spread. And hospitals filled with the dying and the wounded. We know senior figures in Assad’s military regime reviewed the results of the attack. The regime increased their shelling of the same neighborhood in the days that followed.”
Obama said that the facts are indisputable and require a response.
“When dictators commit atrocities they depend upon the world to look the other way and until those horrifying pictures fade from memory,” he said. “But these things happened. The facts cannot be denied.”
