Asia

Home page

Asia

Obama: Syrians' blood on hands of Assad and Russia

17 December 2016 08:35 (UTC +04:00)

President Barack Obama on Friday harshly accused the Syrian regime, along with Moscow and Tehran, of slaughtering civilians in Aleppo.

"We have seen a deliberate strategy of surrounding, besieging and starving innocent civilians," Obama said during a year-end news conference, CNN reports.

"Responsibility for this brutality lies in one place alone: the Assad regime and its allies Russia and Iran," Obama said. "The blood for these atrocities are on their hands." He added, "The Assad regime cannot slaughter its way to legitimacy."

'There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and - because of my office, because I'm president of the United States - I feel responsible,' he said. 'Is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn't deserve to suffer?'

'Unless we were all in and going to take over Syria we were going to have problems,' he said. 'It sounded like the right thing to do but it was going to be impossible to do this on the cheap.'

Obama defended his response or lack of response to Russian hacking before the election, saying that the hacking stopped after he told president Vladimir Putin to stop and that he did not want to undermine the integrity of the election, which Donald Trump was attacking, or to appear partisan.