The U.K. says it will start “seriously” considering joining U.S. military strikes against Syria if chemical attacks were to occur.
“If we know that it has happened, and we can demonstrate it, and if there is a proposal for action where the UK could be useful then I think we should seriously consider it,” Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told the BBC on Tuesday.
On Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 14 civilians had suffered breathing difficulties after a Syrian warplane struck the village in the Eastern Ghouta region in the Syrian capital’s suburbs.
In a similar statement earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron said if the use of chemical weapons against civilians were proven in Syria, “France will strike.”
Syria was meant to have surrendered its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the U.S. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversaw the destruction of the weaponry.
It has also consistently denied using chemical weapons over the course of the civil war, which gripped the country in 2011.
In April, a suspected sarin gas attack hit the town of Khan Shaykhun in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, taking at least 80 lives. Accusing Damascus, the U.S. then launched several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base, taking the lives of about 20 people including both Syrian soldiers and civilians.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
