Washington
\nUS Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said the United States views the Syrian government military assault on rebel-held Idlib as an escalation of the Syrian conflict, as the State Department warned that Washington would respond to any chemical attack by Damascus.<\/p>\n
The Syrian province of Idlib and surrounding areas are the last major enclave held by rebels opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a close Russian ally.<\/p>\n
A source has told Reuters Assad is preparing a phased offensive to regain the province.
\n\u201cThe US sees this as an escalation of an already dangerous conflict,\u201d Pompeo said in a post on Twitter in which he also blasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for \u201cdefending (the) Syrian and Russian assault.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lavrov said on Friday the Syrian government had every right to chase militants out of Idlib and that talks continued on establishing humanitarian corridors there.<\/p>\n
The State Department said the new US special representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, would travel to Israel, Jordan, and Turkey a from Saturday to Tuesday on his first official trip abroad.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey and his delegation will \u201cunderscore that the United States will respond to any chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime,\u201d the State Department said in a statement.<\/p>\n
They will also \u201caddress Russia\u2019s specious allegations of international plans to stage a chemical weapons attack in Syria,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said the United States views the Syrian government military assault on rebel-held Idlib as an escalation of the Syrian conflict, as the State Department warned that Washington would respond to any chemical attack by Damascus. The Syrian province of Idlib and surrounding areas are the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40864,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40865,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40863\/revisions\/40865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}