Member of the Syrian Coalition’s political committee Nora Alameer said that inviting Bouthaina Shaaban, Assad’s mouthpiece, to speak at a conference in Washington about the fight against terrorism is a moral low on the part of the group that organized the event.
Alameer slammed giving a platform for a regime official who is involved in state terrorism to speak, adding that Shaaban is complicit in the Assad regime’s crimes against hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Alameer added that inviting Shaaban to speak at the conference violates US laws that prohibit dealing with any figure or entity on the list of US sanctions.
US State Department on Wednesday said that the US position about Shaaban has not changed, adding that Shaaban has served as a mouthpiece for the bloody Assad regime and has been trying to conceal the regime’s repression and violence against the Syrian people.
Alameer cited Shaaban’s attempts to deny the regime’s responsibility for the 2013 chemical weapons massacre in eastern Ghouta. Shaaban then blamed the massacre on “gunmen” whom she said abducted children and men from Syria’s coastal villages and towns in Latakia and brought them all the way to eastern Ghouta where they were all assembled in one place and gassed to death.
Shaaban, Assad’s media adviser who has appeared several times on Western news outlets to peddle the regime’s narrative on the Syrian revolution, will speak by remote video at an event being hosted by a group called the “Global Alliance for Terminating ISIS” in the US capital. (Source: Syrian Coalition)