Baladi News
The Assad regime in Syria “lost its legitimacy due to its atrocities against Syrian people,” according to Martin Longden, the UK’s special representative for Syria.
Longden said on Twitter on Tuesday that the UK closed its embassy in Damascus in 2012 and “we have no plans to reopen it.”
“End of story,” he stressed.
The UK shuttered its embassy in Damascus after the Bashar al-Assad regime targeted Syrians following anti-regime protests, which followed similar protests of the Arab Spring.
“The Syrian regime has an abhorrent record of using chemical weapons against its own people,” and chemical arms have “become an all-too-regular weapon of war in the Syrian conflict,” Peter Wilson, Britain’s representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said following chemical weapons use by Assad forces in various locations, including Douma.
Wilson’s statement came at an OPCW Executive Council Meeting last year following joint airstrikes by the US, UK, and France on reported Assad regime chemical weapons facilities in Syria.
Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on protesters with unexpected ferocity.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have been killed and millions more displaced by the conflict.
Source: Middle East Monitor.