US confident UN report will confirm chemical weapons use

A UN report expected this week on last month's gas attack in Syria would "reaffirm" the US position, State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf said on Friday. "I'm confident, actually, that the UN report will reaffirm what we've long said, right? It's not going to assign blame, as we've also long said, but it will reaffirm that chemical weapons were used in Syria in large scale on August 21," Harf said at a daily press briefing. Harf reiterated State Secretary John Kerry's call for verifiable action by the Syrian government, as the US and Russia began talks Thursday on the latter's plan to have the regime abide by an international convention banning chemical weapons and to place the regime's chemical weapons under international control before disposing of them. "I just want to underscore that this isn't about signing a piece of paper, that they used chemical weapons indiscriminately, killing over 1,400 innocent civilians, that we're kind of past the point of just being enough to sign a piece of paper,” Harf said.