The situation in Syria is like a "terrible sci-fi film" which is guaranteed to have a bad ending "if the main character is Donald Trump," the chairperson of Germany's Die Linke party said during a discussion in the Bundestag.
The Wednesday comments by Sahra Wagenknecht of Die Linke (Left Party) came on the same day that the party held a rally in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to protest against the airstrikes carried out by the US, France, and the UK in Syria last weekend. Members of the party waved peace flags and held up signs calling for an end to war.
Wagenknecht also spoke at the rally about the movie-like situation unfolding. "Where air raids are announced from one nuclear power to another nuclear power via Twitter, one thinks we're in the wrong movie," she said, referring to Trump's tweet that Russia should "get ready" for missiles to be launched at Syria.
Also at the rally, Die Linke co-chair Dietmar Bartsch slammed his own country's role in ongoing conflicts, noting that Germany is a weapons exporter. "Weapons don't make peace, they always end up in the wrong hands," he said.
Back in the Bundestag, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) said that Berlin supports an independent investigation by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to "document the current war crime" which will serve as evidence later on. His comment was in reference to an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma, which Trump and his allies have blamed on the government of Bashar Assad.
But unlike Maas, Trump – along with British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron – had no desire to wait until the result of any investigation before launching strikes. The premature move has been slammed by Russia, which maintains that the alleged attack – which was initially reported by the rebel-linked White Helmets – was staged.
“We have not just a ‘high level of confidence,’ as our Western partners uniformly put it; we have irrefutable proof that there was no chemical attack in Douma on April 7,” Russia’s ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons, Aleksandr Shulgin, said at a special meeting of the UN chemical watchdog’s executive council. The diplomat added that the incident had been a “pre-planned false-flag attack by the British security services, which could have also been aided by their allies in Washington.”
Meanwhile, the leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alexander Gauland, said during the Bundestag session that Russia remains "the key to a better Syria."
"Let's use it. We don't have another key," he said, adding that the problem with Syria can only be solved through "dialogue with Russia and also with Assad."
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