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Hundreds Protest in Washington Against US Strike on Syria

08 September 2013 04:52 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Hundreds of Americans, including many with Syrian and Middle Eastern roots, marched from the White House to Capitol Hill on Saturday to protest US President Barack Obama’s push for a military strike on Syria, APA reppoorts quoting RIA Novosti.

“We are here to say ‘no war’ because war is destruction, war is more blood and we are tired of war,” Amal Esmail, who moved to the United States seven years ago from Syria and recently became a US citizen, told RIA Novosti just before she addressed the protesters outside the White House.

Esmail and around 500 other protesters, some of whom had traveled to Washington from other parts of the East Coast, set off for the US Capitol just hours after Obama used his weekly address to the American people to plead his case for limited military action against Syria in response to what he called “the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century.”

“We can’t ignore chemical weapons attacks like this one – even if they happen halfway around the world,” Obama said, referring to an alleged chemical weapons attack last month outside Damascus that Washington blames on the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The United States claims that more than 1,400 civilians died in the Aug. 21 attack, including 426 children.

Obama is pushing for a punitive military strike against Syrian targets in response, a plan that has not only sparked protests in the United States, but also sharply divided Washington and Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday at the end of the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg that he remains opposed to military intervention in the crisis without the support of the UN Security Council, and he repeated his belief that the apparent chemical weapons attacks in Syria were planned provocations.

Esmail and many of the other protesters in Washington on Saturday shared Putin’s doubts about who carried out the attacks.