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| By Israel Insider staff December 19, 2007 |
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Syrian President Bashar Assad claimed he turned down an offer to buy nuclear missiles from Pakistani weapons smugglers in 2001. In an interview with the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, he said that the smugglers said they were representing Abdul Kadir Khan, considered the godfather of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
"In 2001, we received a letter from a man introducing himself as Khan. We do not know if the letter was genuine or if it was an Israeli trap," Assad was quoted as saying by the Austrian paper. "Anyhow, we rejected the offer. We are not interested in nuclear weapons or a nuclear facility and I never met Khan."
In so claiming Assad was transparently trying to trump the Iranian claim that it had stopped all nuclear weapons production in 2003. By so claiming, Iran managed to convince the US to ease the pressure to stop Teheran's race toward nuclear capability. He hopes for the same, especially after the aggregation of evidence that Israel blasted a nuclear weapons development facility in Dayr a-Zawr.
Assad spoke disingenuously about the Israeli Air Force strike on an alleged North Korean-built nuclear facility in Syria on September 6. The Syrian president claimed that the target of the air strike was a "military base under construction." Previously the Syrians had denied their was an attack, then said the target was an agricultural research facility. "Since it was a military installation, I cannot go into more details but don't come to the conclusion that it was a nuclear facility," he said.
The pacifistic Assad said that he used tremendous restraint not to give in to what he considered an Israeli provocation. "We could have responded to the IAF strike by firing a missile but it would have given Israel an excuse to start a war and we did not want that."
Regarding the Annapolis conference and the subsequent renewal of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Assad doubted that a peace treated could be reached because the Bush administration would be busy with domestic politics: "We can't talk about reaching a peace accord by 2008 because the US government will be busy with elections. Annapolis was a one-day event but everything will depend on whether events that follow further the aims of the summit."
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