Coalition air strike kills 18 US-backed fighters in Syria

Assad says chemical attack ‘100pc fabrication’

WASHINGTON: An air strike on Tuesday by a US-led coalition fighting Islamic State mistakenly killed 18 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces south of the city of Tabqa, Syria, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

"The strike was requested by the partnered forces, who had identified the target location as an ISIS fighting position," it said in a statement, referring to the Islamic State militant group by an acronym.

"The target location was actually a forward Syrian Democratic Forces fighting position".-Reuters

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said a suspected chemical weapons attack was a "fabrication" to justify a US military strike, as Moscow digs in to defend its ally despite increasing strains with Washington.

In an exclusive interview with AFP in Damascus -- his first since the alleged April 4 attack prompted a US air strike on Syrian forces -- Assad said his army had given up all its chemical weapons and that Syrian military power was not affected by the US strike.

"Definitely, 100 percent for us, it’s fabrication", he said in the interview on Wednesday in reference to the alleged chemical weapons attack.

"Our impression is that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-in-glove with the terrorists. They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack."

Western leaders including US President Donald Trump have accused Assad of being behind last week’s attack in the rebel-held town Khan Sheikhun, saying his forces unleashed a chemical weapon during an air strike.

The suspected attack killed at least 87 people, including many children, and images of the dead and of suffering victims provoked global outrage.

Syria denied any use of chemical weapons and Moscow said the deaths had been the result of a conventional strike hitting a rebel arms depot containing "toxic substances".

In the interview, Assad insisted it was "not clear" whether an attack on Khan Sheikhun had even happened.

"You have a lot of fake videos now", he said. "We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhun. Were they dead at all?"

He insisted several times that his forces had turned over all chemical weapons stockpiles in 2013, under a deal brokered by Russia to avoid threatened US military action.

"There was no order to make any attack, we don’t have any chemical weapons, we gave up our arsenal a few years ago," Assad said.

He said his forces had not been diminished by the US strike.

"Our firepower, our ability to attack the terrorists hasn’t been affected by this strike."

Denouncing a "very barbaric" attack, Trump ordered a strike that saw 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles slam into the airbase in central Syria from where Washington accused Assad’s forces of launching the attack.

It was the first direct US military action against Assad’s forces since the start of Syria’s civil war six years ago and led to a quick downward spiral in ties between Washington and Moscow.

Russia accused the United States of breaking international law with the strike against the Syrian regime, a key ally that Moscow has supported with air strikes since 2015.

Trump gave such criticism short shrift on Wednesday, saying: "I felt we had to do something about it. I have absolutely no doubt we did the right thing."

Standing alongside Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Washington, Trump also said it was "certainly possible" that Russia was aware of the suspected attack.