MOSCOW (Dispatches) – Russia’s Defense Ministry has warned that members of the Takfiri Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist outfit together with the so-called civil defense group White Helmets are planning to stage yet another false-flag chemical attack against civilians in the northwestern province of Idlib to implicate Russian army and Syrian government forces.
“The Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria has received information that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorists together with representatives of the pseudo-humanitarian organization White Helmets are preparing to record a staged video in Ariha town and Jisr ash-Shughur city of the province to accuse the Russian Aerospace Forces and Syrian government troops of indiscriminate strikes on civilian infrastructure and residential areas,” Deputy head of the center, Major General Oleg Yegorov, said.
He added that the Takfiri terrorist group, previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra, has carried out five counts of shelling in the past 24 hours, of which one was recorded in the Idlib de-escalation zone. Areas in the same Syrian province as well as the western coastal province of Latakia were also shelled on four different occasions.
“In Aleppo province, a Syrian soldier was also wounded when terrorists stationed in Tekad town west of Aleppo used light weapons to target positions of government forces near Basratun village,” Yegorov said.
The White Helmets group, which claims to be a humanitarian NGO, is known for its coordination with terror outfits in Syria to carry out staged chemical attacks in order to falsely incriminate Syrian government forces and fabricate pretexts for military strikes by a U.S.-led military coalition present in Syria since 2014.
On April 14, 2018, the United States, Britain, and France carried out a string of airstrikes against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers northeast of the capital Damascus.
That alleged attack was reported by the White Helmets group, which published videos showing them purportedly treating survivors.
Washington and its allies blamed Damascus for the Douma attack, an allegation strongly rejected by the Syrian government.
This is while Syria surrendered its stockpile of chemical weapons in 2014 to a joint mission led by the United States 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.