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Syria Has Right To Deter Nuclear Israel: Assad
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"We
are a country which is [partly] occupied and from time to time we
are exposed to Israeli aggression," Assad
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LONDON,
January 6 (IslamOnline.net) – Syria's President Bashar Assad said on
Monday, January 5, that his country has every right to acquire
deterrent weapons as long as Israel is adamant about scrapping its
undeclared and increasingly growing nuclear arsenal.
"It
is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves. It is not
difficult to get most of these weapons anywhere in the world and they
can be obtained at any time," Assad told the British daily The
Telegraph.
Speaking
for more than 90 minutes, the young Syrian leader said the occupation
of the Golan Heights by Israel and the latest Israeli attack on an
alleged Palestinian base near the capital Damascus made Syria
convinced more than ever of the need to have deterrent weapons.
"We
are a country which is [partly] occupied and from time to time we are
exposed to Israeli aggression," he said.
Assad
said Syria has put forward a new U.N Security Council draft resolution
for removing all WMD from the Middle East, including Israel's nuclear
stockpiles.
"Unless
this applies to all countries, we are wasting our time," he said.
The
United States frequently used its veto power to spike Syrian-backed
resolutions condemning Israel.
The
last one was used on October 15 against a
draft resolution condemning Israel's separation wall in the
occupied Palestinian territories, under the yoke of Israeli occupation
since 1948.
Assad
also repeated Syria's offer to resume negotiations with Israel over
the occupation of the Golan Heights. But he said that an agreement was
impossible as long as Israel insisted on starting negotiations from
scratch, the paper said.
He
further blamed anew the "Israeli killings, the Israeli
occupations" for the continued bombings in Israel.
"They
[resistance operations] have become a reality we cannot control,"
he said.
But
he asserted that the offices of the Palestinian resistance groups in
Syria had been closed.
The
groups could no longer "do anything military from these places.
They are closed", he averred.
The
White House and Downing Street accuse Syria of allegedly
"harboring terrorism" by supporting the Palestinian
resistance groups and the Lebanese resistance movement Hizbollah.
U.S.
President George W. Bush on December 12 signed
into law a bill authorizing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Syria
over its alleged support for "terrorism" and
"occupation" of Lebanese territories.
Some
U.S. Senators feared
the law "could later be used to build a case for a
military intervention against Syria".
Asked
about Libya's dramatic
announcement that it was giving up its weapons programs, the
Syrian president sufficed to say it was "a correct step".
Last
month, both Assad and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said during a
summit in Sharm El-Sheikh that that the current developments in the
Middle East demonstrated the need to declare the Middle East a zone
free of all weapons of mass destruction — including all states and
Israel.
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